



MOTHS 


By “OUIDA,” author of “Under Two 
Flags,’’ “Wanda,” “Tricotrin,” “ Othmar 
“ Pascarel,” “ Guilder oy,” etc. : : : : : : 



NEW YORK AND LONDON 













TRANSFERRED FfKffe 
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MOTHS 


CHAPTER I. 

Lady Dolly ought to have been perfectly happy. She had 
everything that can constitute the joys of a woman of her epoch. 

She was at Trouville. She had won heaps of money at play. 
She had made a correct book on the races. She had seer" aer 
chief rival looking bilious in'an unbecoming gown. She had had 
a letter from her husband to say he was going away to Java or 
Jupiter or somewhere indefinitely. She wore a costume which 
had cost a great tailor twenty hours of anxious and continuous 
reflection. Nothing but baptiste, indeed; but baptiste sublimized 
and apotheosized by niello buttons, old lace, and genius. She had 
her adorers and slaves grouped about her. She had louna her 
dearest friend out in cheating at cards. She had dined the night 
before at the Maison Persanne, and would dine this night at the 
Maison Normande. She had been told a state secret by a minis- 
ter which she knew it was shameful of him to have been coaxed 
and chaffed into revealing. She had had a new comedy read to 
her in manuscript form three months before it would be given in 
Paris, and had screamed at all its indecencies in the choice com- 
pany of a Serene Princess and two ambassadresses as they all 
took their chocolate in their dressing-gowns. Above all, she was 
at Trouville, having left half a million of debt3 behind her strewn 
about in all directions, and standing free as air in gossamer gar- 
ments on the planks in the summer sunshine. There was a charm- 
ing blue sea beside her, a balmy, fluttering breeze around her, a 
crowd of the most fashionable sunshades in Europe before her, 
like a bed of full-blown anemones. She had floated and bobbed 
and swum and splashed, semi-nude, with all the other mermaids 
a la mode , and had shown that she must still be a pretty woman, 
pretty even in daylight, or the men would not have looked at her 
BO, and yet, with all this, she was not enjoying herself. 

, It was very hard. 

The yachts came and went, the sands glittered, the music 


MOTHS : 


sounded, men and women in bright-colored stripes took headers 
into the tide, or pulled themselves about in little canoes ; the 
snowy canvass of the tent shone like a huge white mushroom, 
and the faces of all the houses were lively with green shutters 
and awnings brightly striped like the bathers; people, the gayest 
and best-born people in Europe, laughed and chattered, and 
made love, and Lady Lolly with them, pacing the deal planks 
with her pretty high-heeled shoes; but for all that she was 
wretched. 

She was thinking to herself, “ What on earth shall I do with 
herr 

It ruined her morning. It clouded the sunshine. It spoiled 
her cigarette. It made "the waltzes sound like dirges. It made 
her chief rival look almost good-looking to her. It made a gown, 
combined of parrots’ breasts and passion-dowers that she was 
going to wear in the afternoon, feel green and yellow and bilious 
m her anticipation of it, though it was quite new and a wonder. 
It made her remember her debts. It made her feel that she had 
not digested those ecrevisses at supper. It made her fancy that 
her husband might not really go to Java or Jupiter. It was so 
sudden, so appalling, so bewildering, so endless a question; and 
Lady Dolly only asked questions, she never answered them or 
waited for their answers. 

After all, what could she do with her? She, a pretty woman 
and a wonderful flirt, who liked to dance to the very end of the 
cotillon, and had as many lovers as she had pairs of shoes. 
What could she do with a daughter just sixteen years old? 

“ It makes one look so old!” she had said to herself, wretched- 
ly, as she had bobbed and danced in the waves. Lady Dolly was 
not old; she was not quite thirty- four, and she was as prett^ aj 
if she were seventeen, perhaps prettier; even when she waLnot 
“ done up,” and she did not need to do herself up very much 
just yet, really not much, considering — well, considering so 
many things, that she never went to bed till daylight, that she 
never ate anything digestible and never drank anything whole- 
some, that she made her waist fifteen inches round, and de- 
stroyed her nerves with gambling, chloral, and many other 
things; considering these, and so many other reasons, besides 
the one supreme reason that everybody does it, and that you al- 
ways look a fright if you don’t do it. 

The thought of her daughter’s impending arrival made Lady 
Lolly miserable. Telegrams were such horrible things. Before 
whe had had time to realize the force of the impending catas- 
trophe, the electric wires had brought her tidings that the girl 
was actually on her way across the sea, not to be stayed by any 
kind of means, and would be there by nightfall. Nightfall at 
Trouville! When Lady Dolly in the deftest of summer- evening 
toilettes would be just opening her pretty mouth for the first 
morsel of salmon and drop of Chablis, with the windows open, 
and the moon rising on the sea, and the card-tables ready set, 
and the band playing within earshot, and the courtiers all 
around and at her orders, whether she liked to go out and danca, 
or stay at home for poker or chemin-de-fer. 


MOTHS. 


“ What in the world shall I do with her, Jack?* a he sighed to 
her chief counsellor. 

The chief counsellor opened his lips, answered, “ Marry her!* 
then closed them on a big cigar. 

“ Of course! One always marries girls; how stupid you are! r 
BCid Lady Dolly, peevishly. 

The counsellor smiled grimly. “ And then you will be a grand- 
mother,” he said, with a cruel relish: he had just paid a bill at a 
bric-a-brac shop for her, and it had left him unamiable. 

“I suppose you think that witty,” said Lady Dolly, with 
delicate contempt. “Well, Helene, there, is a great-grand- 
mother, and look at her!” 

Helene was a Prussian princess, married to a Russian minister; 
she was arrayed in white, with a tender blending about it of all 
the blues in creation, from that of a summer sky to that of a 
lapis lazuli ring; she had a quantity of fair curls, a broad hat 
wreathed with white lilac and convolvulus, a complexion of 
cream, teeth of pearl, a luminous and innocent smile; she was 
talking at the top of her voice and munching chocolate; she had 
a circle of young men round her; she looked, perhaps, if you 
wished to be ill-natured, eight-and-twenty. Yet a great-grand- 
mother she was, and the “ Almanach de Gotha” said so, and, 
alas! said her age. 

“ You won’t wear so well as Helene. You don’t take care of 
yourself,” the counsellor retorted, with a puff of smoke between 
each sentence. 

“ What!” screamed Lady Dolly, so that her voice rose above 
the din of all the other voices, the sound of the waves, the click- 
clack of the high heels, and the noise of the band. Not take care 
of herself! — she! — who had every fashionable medicine that came 
out, and, except at Trouville, never would be awakened for any 
earthly thing till one o’clock in the day. 

“ You don’t take care of yourself,” said the counsellor. “No; 
you eat heaps of sweetmeats; you take too much tea, too much 
ice, too much sonp, too much wine, too much everything. You 

“ Oh, if you mean to insult me and call me a drunkar u. 1" 

said Lady Dolly, very hotly, flushing up a little. 

“You smoke quite awfully too much,” pursued her companion, 
immovably. It hurts us , and can’t be good for you. Indeed all 
you women would be dead if you smoked right; you don’t smoke 
right; you send all your smoke out, chattering; it never gets into 
your mouth even, and so that saves you all; if you drew it in, as 
we do, you would be dead, all of you. Who was the first woman 
that smoked, I often wonder?” 

“ The idea of my not wearing as well as Helene, ’’pursued Lady 
Dolly, unable to forget the insult. “Well, there are five-and- 
twenty years between us, thank goodness, and more!” 

“Isay you won’t,” said the counsellor, “not if you go on as 
you do, screaming all night over those cards and taking quarts 
of chloral because you can’t sleep. Why can’t you sleep? ) 
can.” 

“All the lower animals sleep like tops*” said Lady Dolly. 


4 


MOTHS. 


“ You seem to have been reading medical treatises, and they 
haven’t agreed with you. Go and buy me a ‘ Petit Journal.’ ” 

The counsellor went grumbling and obedient — a tall, good- 
looking, well-built, and very fair Englishman, who had shot 
everything that was shootable all over the known world. Lady 
Dolly smiled serenely on the person who glided to her elbow and 
took the vacant place — a slender, pale, and graceful Frenchman, 
the Due de Dinant of the vieille roche. 

“ Dear old Jack gets rather a proser,” she thought, and she 
began to plan a fishing picnic with her little duke — a picnic at 
which everybody was to go barefooted, and dress like peasants 
— real common peasants, you know, of course — and dredge, 
didn’t they call it, and poke about, and hunt for oysters. Lady 
Dolly had lovely feet, and could afford to uncover them; very 
few of her rivals could do so, a fact of which she took cruel ad- 
vantage, and from which she derived exquisite satisfaction in 
clear shallows and rock pools. “The donkeys! they’ve cramped 
themselves in tight boots!” she said to herself, with the scorn of 
a superior mind. She always gave her miniature feet and arched 
insteps their natural play, and therein displayed a wisdom of 
which, it must be honestly confessed, the rest of her career gave 
no glimpse. 

The counsellor bought the Petit Journal and a Figaro for him- 
self, and came back; but she did not notice him at all. A few 
years before, the neglect would have made him miserable; no\y 
it made him comfortable: such is the ingratitude of man. He 
sat down and read the Figaro with complacency, while she, 
under her sunshade, beamed on Gaston de Dinant, and on four 
or five others of his kind; youngsters without youth, but as a 
compensation for the loss, with a perfect knowledge of Judic’s 
last song and Dumas’ last piece, of the last new card-room scan- 
dal and the last drawing-room adultery; of everything that was 
coming out at the theaters, and of all that was of promise in the 
stables. They were not in the least amusing in themselves, but 
the chatter of the world has almost always an element of the 
amusing in it, because it ruins so many characters, and gossips 
and chuckles so merrily and so lightly over infamy, incest, or 
anything else that it thinks only fun, and deals with such impu- 
dent personalities. At any rate, they amused Lady Dolly, and 
her Due de Dinant did more; they arranged the picnic — without 
shoes, that was indispensable, without shoes, and in real peas- 
ant’s things, else there would be no joke; they settled their pic- 
nic, divorced half a dozen of their friends, conjectured about 
another half-dozen all those enormities which modern society 
would blush at in the Bible, but, out of it, whispers and chuckles 
over very happily; speculated about the few unhappy unknowns 
who had dared to enter the magic precincts of these very dusty 
sands; wondered with whom the Prince of Wales would dine 
that night, and whose that new yawl was, that had been stand- 
ing off since morning flying the R. Y. S. flag; and generally di- 
verted one another so well that, beyond an occasional passing 
spasm of remembrance, Lady Dolly had forgotten her impending 
trial. 


MOTHS. 


u I think I will go in to breakfast.” she said, at last, and got 
up. It was one o’clock, and the sun was getting hot; the ane- 
mone-bed began to heave and be dispersed; up and down the 
planks the throng was thick still; the last bathers, peignoir- 
enwrapped, were sauntering up from the edge of the sea. The 
counsellor folded his “Figaro” and shut up his cigar-case; his 
was the useful but humble task to go home before her and see 
that the Moselle was iced, the prawns just netted, the straw- 
berries just culled, and the cutlets duly frothing in their silver 
dish. The Due de Dinant sauntered by her with no weightier 
duty than to gaze gently down into her eyes, an<J buy a stephano- 
tis or a knot of roses for her bosom when they passed the flower- 
baskets. 

“ What are they all looking at?” said Lady Dolly to her escort, 
suddenly. Bodies of the picturesque parti-colored crowd were 
all streaming the same way, inland towards the sunny white 
houses, whose closed green shutters were all so attractively sug- 
gestive of the shade and rest to be found within. But the heads 
of the crowd were turning back seaward, and their eyes and eye- 
glasses all gazed in the same direction. 

Was it at the Prince? Was it at the President? Was it the 
Channel fleet had hove in sight? or some swimmer drowning, or 
some porpoises? or what? No, it was a new arrival. A new ar- 
rival was no excitement at Trouville if it were somebody that 
everybody knew. Emperors were common-place; ministers 
were nonentities; marshals were monotonous; princes were 
more numerous than the porpoises; and great dramatists, great 
singers, great actors, great orators, were all there as the very 
sands of the sea. But an arrival of somebody that nobody knew 
had a certain interest, if only as food for laughter. It seemed so 
queer that there should be "such people, or that, existing, they 
should venture there. 

“ Who is it?” said Trouville, in one breath, and the women 
laughed, and the men stared, and both sexes turned ronnd by 
common consent. Something lovelier than anything there, was 
coming through them, as a sunbeam comes through dust. Yet it 
wore nothing but brown holland! Brown holland at Trouville 
may be worn indeed, but it is brown holland transfigured, subli- 
mated, canonized, born, like Lady Dolly’s baptiste, into an 
apotheosis of ecru lace, and floss silk embroideries, and old point 
cravats, and buttons of repousse work or ancient smalto; brown 
holland raised to the empyrean, and no more discoverable to the 
ordinary naked eye than the original flesh, fish, or fowl lying at 
the root of a good cook’s mayonnaise is discernible to the unedu- 
cated palate. 

But this was brown holland naked and not ashamed, unadorned 
and barbaric, without any attempt at disguise of itself, and look- 
ing wet and wrinkled from sea- water, and very brown indeed 
beside the fresh and ethereal costumes of the ladies gathered 
there, that looked like bubbles just blown into a thousand hues to 
float upon the breeze. 

“Brown holland 1 good gracious!” said Lady Dolly, putting up 
tier eye-glass, She could not very well see the wearer of it, there 


n 


MOTHS. 


were so many men between them; but she could see the wet, 
clinging, tumbled skirt which came in among the wonderful gar- 
ments of the sacred place, and to make this worse there was an 
old Scotch plaid above the skirt, not worn, thrown on anyhow, 
as she said, pathetically, long afterward. 

“ What a guy!” said Lady Dolly. 

“ What a face!” said the courtiers; but they said it under their 
breath, being wise in their generation, and praising no woman 
before another. 

But the brown holland came toward her, catching in the wind, 
and showing feet as perfect as her own. The brown liolland 
stretched two hands out to her, and a voice cried aloud: 

“ Mother! don’t you know me, mother?” 

Lady Dolly gave a little sharp scream, then stood still. Her 
pretty face was very blank, her rosy small mouth was parted in 
amaze and disgust. 

“ In that dress!” she gasped, when the position became clear 
to her and her senses returned. 

But the brown holland was clinging in a wild and joyous kind 
of horrible, barbarous way all about her, as it seemed, and the 
Scotch plaid was pressing itself against her baptiste skirts. 

“ Oh, mother! how lovely you are! Not changed in the very 
least! Don’t you know me? Oh, dear! don’t you know me? I 
am Vere.” 

Lady Dolly was a sweet-tempered woman by nature, and 
only made fretful occasionally by maids’ contretemps, debts, 
husbands, and other disagreeable accompaniments of life. But 
at this moment she had no other sense than that of rage. She 
could have struck her sunshade furiously at all creation; she 
could have fainted, only the situation would have been rendered 
more ridiculous still if she had, and that consciousness sustained 
her; the sands, and the planks, and the sea, and the sun, all went 
round her in a whirl of wrath. She could hear all her lovers, 
and friends, and rivals, and enemies tittering ; and Princess 
Helen Olgarouski, who was at her shoulder, said, in the pleas- 
antest way: 

“ Is that your little daughter, dear? Why she is quite a wom- 
an! A new beauty for Monseigneur.” 

Lady Dolly could have slain her hundreds in that moment, 
had her sunshade but been of steel. To be made ridiculous! 
There is no more disastrous destiny under the sun. 

The brown holland had ceased to cling about her, finding itself 
repulsed; the Scotch plaid had fallen down on the plank; 
there were two brillant and wistful eyes regarding her from 
above, and one hand still stretched out shyly. 

“ I am Vere!” said a voice, in which tears trembled and held 
a struggle with pride. 

“ I see you are!” said Lady Dolly, with asperity. “ What on 
earth made you come in this — this — indecent way for — without 
even dressing! I expected you at night. Is that Fraulein 
Schroder? She should be ashamed of herself.” 

“ I see no shame, Miladi,” retorted in guttural tones an injured 
German, “in that a long-absent and much-loving daughter 


MOTHS. % 

should be breathless to flee to embrace the one to whom she 
owes her being ” 

“ Hold your tongue!” said Lady Dolly, angrily. Fraulein 
Schroder wore a green veil and blue spectacles, and was not 
beautiful to the eye, and was grizzle-headed; and the friends and 
lovers and courtiers and enemies were laughing uncontrollably. 

“ What an angel of loveliness! But a woman; quite a woman. 
She must be twenty at least, my dear?” said Princess Helene, 
who always said the pleasantest thing she could think of at any 
time. 

“Vere is sixteen,” said Lady Dolly, sharply, much ruffled, 
seeing angrily that the girl’s head, in its sunburnt sailor’s hat 
bound with a black ribbon, was nearly a foot higher than her 
own, hung down, though it now was, like a rose in the rain, 

There was a person coming up from his mile swim in the sea, 
with the burnous-like folds cast about him more gracefully than 
other men were ever able to cast theirs. 

“How do you manage to get so much grace out of a dozen 
yards of bath toweling, Correze?” asked an Englishman who 
was with him. 

“ C’est mon metier a moi d'etre poseur ” said the other, para- 
phrasing the famous saying of Joseph the Second. 

“ Ah, no,” said the Englishman, “you never do poser; that is 
the secret of the charm of the thing. I feel like a fool in these 
spadilles and swathings; but you — you look as if you had just 
come up from a sacred river of the East, and are worthy to sing 
strophes to a Nourmahal.” 

“ Encore unefois — mon metier said the other, casting some of 
the linen folds over his head, which was exceedingly handsome, 
and almost line for line like the young Sebastian. At that 
moment he saw the little scene going on between Lady Dolly 
and her daughter, and watched it from a distance with much 
amusemement. 

“ What an exquisite face that child has ! — that lovely tint 
like the wild white rose, there is nothing like it. It makes all 
the women with color look vulgar,” he said, after a prolonged 
gaze through a friend’s field glass. “Who is she, do you say? 
Miladi Dolly’s daughter? Is it possible? I thought Miladi 
was made herself yesterday in Giroux’s shop, and was kept 
in a wadded box when her mechanism was not wound up. 
Surely it is impossible Dolly can ever have stooped to such a 
homely unartificial thing as maternity. You must be mistaken.” 

“No. In remote ages she married a cousin. The white wild 
rose is the result.” 

“ A charming result. A child only, but an exquisite child. It 
is a pity we are in this costume, or we would go and be presented; 
though Miladi would not be grateful, to judge by her face now. 
Poor little Dolly? It is hard to have a daughter — and a daughter 
that comes to Trouville in August.” 

Then he who was a figure of grace even in white toweling, and 
had a face like Del Sarto’s Sebastian, handed the field-glass back 
to his friend, and went to his hotel to dress. 

Meanwhile Lady Dolly was saying, irritably, “Go home to my 


8 MOTHS, 

house, Vere — the Chalet Ludoff. Of course you ought to have 

g one there first: why didn’t you go there first and dress f None 
ut an idiot would ever have allowed you to do it. The idea! 
Walk on pray — and as quickly as you can.” 

“We went to the house, but they said you were on the beach, 
and so, mother ” 

“ Pray don’t call me mother in that way. It makes one feel 
like What’s-her-name in the ‘ Trovatore,’ ” said Lady Dolly, with 
a little laugh, that was very fretful. “ And be kind enough not 
to stand here and stare: everybody is listening.” 

“What for should they not listen?” said Fraulein Schroder, 
Stoutly. “ Can there be in nature a sweeter, more soul-inspiring 
and of-heaven-always-blessed-emotion than the outcoming of 

filial love and the spontaneous flow of ” 

“Rubbish!” said Lady Dolly. “Vere, oblige me by walking 
in; I shall be with you in a moment at the house. You’ll find 
Jack there. You remember Jack?” 

“What an angel! any one would give her twenty years at 
least,” said Princess Helene again. “ But your German, in her 

blue glasses, she is a drolesse ” 

“A very clever woman; dreadfully blue and conscientious, 
and all that is intolerable, the old duchess found her for me,” 
replied Lady Dolly, still half willing to faint, and half inclined 
to cry, and wholly in that state of irritation which Fuseli was 
wont to say made swearing delicious. 

“ I always fancied — so stupid of me! — that your Vere was quite 
a little child, always at the Sacre Cceur,” continued the princess, 
musingly, with her sweetest smile. 

“ I wish to Heaven we had a Sacre Coeur,” said Lady Dolly, 
devoutly. “We wretched English people have nothing half so 
sensible; you know that, Helene, as well as I do. Vere is tall, 
and very like her poor father and the old duke.” 

“ But Vere — surely that is not the name of a girl?” 

“ It was her father’s. That was the old duchess’ doing, too. 
Of course one will call her Vera. Well, au revoir, via tres-cliere , 
a cesoir .” 

“ With nods and becks and wreathed smiles,” and many good- 
days and pretty words, poor Lady Dolly got away from her 
friends and acquaintances, and had the common luxury of hear- 
ing them all begin laughing again as soon as they imagined she 
had got out of earshot. Her young courtiers accompanied her, 
of course, but she dismissed them on the doorstep. 

“I can’t think of anything but my child to-day!” she said, 
very charmingly. “So glad you think her nice-looking. When 

she is dressed , you know ” and she disappeared into her own 

house with the phrase unfinished, leaving all it suggested to her 
hearers. 

“Where’s Vere?” she said sharply to her counsellor, entering 
the breakfast-room, before the empty stove of which, from the 
sheer fireplace club-room habit of his race, that person stood 
Smoking. 

“ Gone to her room,” he answered. “ You’ve made her cj 3* 
You were nasty, weren't you?” 


MOTHS. 


9 


“I was furious I Who wouldn’t have been? That vile dress! 
that abominable old woman! And kissing me too — me— on the 
beach!” 

Her companion smiled grimly. 

“ She couldn’t tell that one musn’t touch you when you’re 
‘done up.’ You didn't do up so much three years ago. She’ll 
soon learn, never fear.” 

“You grow quite horribly rude, Jack.” 

He smoked serenely. 

“ And quite too odiously coarse.” 

He continued to smoke. 

She often abused him, but she never could do without him; 
and he was aware of that. 

“And what a hight she is! and what her gowns will cost! and 
she must come out soon — and that horrid Helene!” sobbed Lady 
Dolly, fairly bursting into tears. She had been so gay and com- 
fortable at Trouville, and now it was all over. What comfort 
could there be with a girl nearly six feet high, that looked twenty 
years old when she was sixteen, and who called her “ mother?” 

“Don’t make a fuss,” said the counsellor from the stove. 
“She’s very handsome, awfully pretty; you’ll marry her in no 
time, and be just as larky as you were before. Don’t cry, there’s 
a dear little soul. Look here, the cutlets are getting cold, and 
there’s all these mullets steaming away for nothing. Come and 
eat, and the thing won’t seem so terrible.” 

Being versed in the ways of consolations, he opened a bottle of 
Moselle with an inviting rush of sound, and let the golden stream 
foam itself softly over a lump of ice in a glass. Lady Dolly 
looked up, dried her eyes, and sat down at the table. 

“Vere must be hungry, surely,” she said, with a sudden re- 
membrance, twenty minutes later, eating her last morsel of a 
truffled timbale. 

The counsellor smiled grimly. 

“ It’s rather late to think about that. I sent her her breakfast 
before you came.” 

“ Dear me! how very fatherly of you!” 

The counsellor laughed. “ I feel like her father, I assure you.” 

Lady Dolly colored, and lit a cigarette. She felt that she would 
not digest her breakfast. Henceforth there would be two bills 
to pay — the interest of them, at any rate — at all the great tailors* 
and milliners’ houses in Paris and London; she had an uneasy 
sense that to whirl in and out the mazes of the cotillons, or 
smoke your cigarette on the smooth lawns of shooting-clubs, vis- 
a-vis with your own daughter, was a position, in the main, rather 
ridiculous; and she had still an uneasier conviction that the girl 
in the brown holland would not be taught in a moment to com- 
prehend the necessity for the existence of Jack, — and the rest. 

“ That horrid old duchess!” she murmured, sinking to sleep 
with the last atom of her cigarette crumbling itself away on the 
open page of a French novel. For it was the duchess who had 
sent her vere. 


10 


Morm 


CHAPTER II. 

Lady Dorothy Vanderdecken, who was Lady Dolly go every- 
body, down to the very boys that ran after her carriage in the 
streets, was the seventh daughter of a very poor peer, the Earl 
of Caterham, who was a clever politician, but always in a chronic 
state of financial embarrassment. Lady Dolly had made a very 
silly love-match with her own cousin, Vere Herbert, a younger 
son of her uncle, the Duke of Mull and Cantire, when she 
was only seventeen and he had just left Oxford and entered 
the Church. But Vere Herbert had only lived long enough 
for her to begin to get very tired of his country parsonage 
in the wilds of the Devonshire moors, and to be left before 
she was twenty with a miserable pittance for her portion, and a 
little daughter twelve months old to plague her father. . Lady 
Dolly cried terribly for a fortnight, and thought she cried for 
love, when she only cried for worry. In another fortnight or so 
she had ceased to cry, had found out that crape brightened her 
pretty tea-rose skin, had discarded her baby to the care of hey 
aunt and mother-in-law, the old and austere Duchess of Mull, 
and had gone for her health with her own gay little mother, the 
Countess of Caterham, to the south of France. In the south of 
France, Lady Dolly forgot that she had ever cried at all, and in 
a year’s time from the loss of Vere Herbert had married herself 
again to a Mr. Vanderdecken, an Englishman of Dutch extraction, 
a rich man, of no remarkable lineage, a financier, a contractor, 
a politician, a very restless creature, always rushing about alone, 
and never asking any questions — which suited her. On the other 
hand, it suited him to ally himself with a score of great families 
and obtain a lovely and high-born wife; it was one of those mar- 
riages which everybody calls so sensible, so suitable, so very nice ! 
Quite unlike the marriage with poor Vere Herbert, which every- 
body had screamed at, as they had not made up five hundred a 
year in income, or forty-five years in age, between them. 

Lady Dolly and Vanderdecken did not perhaps find it so per- 
fectly well assorted when they had had a little of it; she 
thought him stingy, he thought her frivolous, but they did not 
tell anybody else so, and so everybody always said that the mar- 
riage was very nice. They were always seen in the Bois or the 
Park together, and always kept house together three months 
every spring in London; they went to the country houses to- 
gether, and certainly dined out together at least a dozen times 
every season; nothing could be nicer, Lady Dolly took care of 
that. 

She thought him a great bore, a great screw; she never had 
enough money by half, and he was sometimes very nasty about 
checks. But he was not troublesome about anything else, and 
was generally head over ears in some wonderful loan, or contract, 
or subsidy, which entailed distant journeys and absorbed him 
entirely; so that, on the whole, she was content and enjoyed her- 
self. 

This morning, however, iiad gone down to the shore not 


MOTHS . 


11 


indeed fully anticipating such a blow as had fallen upon her, but 
ruffled, disgusted, and nervous, consoious that her daughter was 
traveling toward her, and furious with the person she termed 
a “ horrid old cat.” 

The old cat was the now dowager Duchess of Mull, who for 
fifteen years had kept safe in Northumbria the daughter of poor 
Vere, and now had hurled her like a cannon-ball at Lady Dolly’s 
head in this hideous, abominable, unforeseen manner, straight 
on the sands of Trouville, in sight of that snake in angel’s guise, 
the Princesse Helene Olgarouski! 

Lady Dolly, who never would allow that she gave up her 
maternal rights, though she would never be bored with maternal 
responsibilities, had quarreled for the nine-hundredth time (by 
post) with the Duchess of Mull; quarreled desperately, impu- 
dently, irrevocably, quarreled once too often; and the result of the 
quarrel had been the instant dispatch of her daughter to Trou- 
ville, with the duchess’ declaration that she could struggle for 
the soul of her poor son’s child no longer, and that, come what 
would, she consigned Vere to her mother then and forevermore. 

“ The horrid woman will be howling for the child again in 
a week’s time,” thought Lady Dolly, “ but she has done it to 
spite me, and I’ll keep the child to spite her. That’s only 
fair.” 

The duchess had taken her at her word, that was all; but then, 
indeed, there are few things more spiteful than one can do to 
anybody than to take them at their word. Lady Dolly had been 
perplexed, irritated, and very angry with herself for having writ- 
ten all that rubbish about suffering from the unnatural depriva- 
tion of her only child’s society — rubbish which had brought this 
stroke of retribution on her head. 

She had pulled her blonde perruque all awry in her vexation; 
she did not want that perruque at all, for her own hair was thick 
and pretty, but she covered it up and wore the perruque because 
it was the fashion to do so. 

Lady Dolly had always been, and was, very pretty; she had 
lovely large eyes, and the tiniest mouth, and. a complexion which 
did not want all the pains she bestowed on it; when she had not 
the perruque on, she had dark silky hair all tumbled about over 
her eyebrows in a disarray that cost her maid two hours to com- 
pose; and her eyebrows themselves were drawn beautifully in 
two fine, dark, slender lines by a pencil that supplied the one 
defect of Nature. When she was seventeen, at the rectory, 
among the rosebuds on the lawn, she had been a rosebud herself; 
now'she was a Dresden statuette; the statuette was the more 
finished and brilliant beauty of the two, and never seemed the 
worse for wear. This is the advantage of artificial over natural 
loveliness: the letter will alter with health or feeling, the former 
never; it is always the same, unless you come in on it at its toi- 
lette, or see it when it is very ill. 

Lady Dolly this morning woke up prematurely from her 
sleep, and fancied she was in the old parsonage gardens on 
the lawn, among the roses in Devonshire, with poor Vere’s pale, 
handsome face looking down so tenderly on hers. She felt a 


12 


MOTHS. 


mist before her eyes, a tightness at her throat, a vague and wor- 
ried pain all over her. “It is the prawns I” she said to herself. 
“ I will never smoke after prawns again.” 

She w r as all alone ; the counsellor had gone to his schooner, 
other counsellors were at their hotels ; it was an hour -when 
everything except Englishmen and dogs were indoors. She rose, 
shook her muslin breakfast - wrapper about her impatiently, and 
went to see her daughter., 

“ He used to be so fond of me, poor fellow 1” she thought. 
Such a pure, fond passion then among the roses by the sea. It 
had all been very silly, and he had used to bore her dreadfully 
with Keble, and his namesake, George of holy memory, and that 
old proser, Thomas a Kempis; but still it had been a different 
thing from all these other loves. He lay in his grave there by 
the Atlantic among the Devon roses, and she had had no memory 
of him for many a year; and when he had been alive, she had 
thought the church, and the old women, and the saints, and the 
flannel, and the choral services, and the matins and vesper non- 
sense, all so tiresome; but still he had loved her. Of course they 
all adored her now, heaps of them; but liis love had been a 
different thing from theirs. And somehow Lady Dolly felt a 
tinge and twinge of shame. 

“ Poor Vere,” she murmured to herself, tenderly; and so went 
to see his daughter, who had been called after him by that 
absurd old woman, the Duchess of Mull, with whom Lady Dolly, 
in her dual relation of niece and daughter-in-law, had always 
waged a fierce undying war — a war in which she*had now got 
the worst of it. 

“ May I come in, dear?*’ she said at the bed-chamber door. She 
felt almost nervous. It was very absurd; but why would the 
girl have her dead father’s eyes? 

The girl opened the door and stood silent. 

“ A beautiful creature. They are quite right,” thought Lady 
Dolly, now that her brain was no longer filled with the dreadful 
rumpled brown holland and the smiling face of Princess Helene. 
The girl was in a white wrapper like her own, only without any 
lace and any of the ribbons that adorned Lady Dolly at all points, 
as tassels a Roman horse at Carnival. Lady Dolly was too 
lovely herself, and also far too contented with herself , to feel any 
jealousy; but she looked at her daughter critically, as she 
would have looked at a young untried actress on the boards of 
the Odeon. “ Quite another style to me, that is fortunate,” she 
thought, as she looked. “ Like Vere — very — quite extraordinari- 
ly like Vere — only handsomer still.” 

Then she kissed her daughter very prettily on both cheeks, and 
with effusion embraced her, much as she embraced Princess 
Helene or anyboby else that she hated. 

w “You took me by surprise to-day, love,” she said, with a little 
accent of apology, “ and you know I do so detest scenes. Pray 
try and remember that.” 

“ Scenes?” said Vere. “ Please, what are they?” 

66 Scenes?” said Lady Dolly, kissing her once more, and a little 
as everybody is who is suddenly asked to define a fa* 


MOTHS. 


13 


miliftT word. “Scenes? Well, dear me, scenes are — scenes. 
Anything, you know, that makes a fuss, that looks silly, that 
sets people laughing; don’t you understand? Anything done be- 
fore people, you know; it is vulgar.” 

think I understand,” said Vere Herbert. She was a very 
lovely girl, and despite her hight still looked a child. Her small 
head was perfectly poised on a slender neck, and her face, quite 
colorless, with a complexion like the leaf of a white rose, had 
perfect features, straight, delicate, and noble; her fair hair was 
cut square over her brows and loosely knotted behind; she had a 
beautiful serious mouth, not so small as her mother’s, and serene 
eyes, gray as night, contemplative, yet wistful. 

She was calm and still. She had cried as if her heart would 
break, but she would have died rather than let her mother guess 
it. She had been what the French call refoulee sur elle-meme; 
and the process is chilling. 

“ Have you all you want?” said Lady Dolly, casting a hasty 
glance round the room. “ You know I didn’t expect you, dear; 
not in the least.” 

“ Surely my grandmother wrote?” 

“Your grandmother telegraphed that you had started; just 
like her! Of course I wished to have you here, and meant to do 
so, but not all in a moment. 

“The horrid old woman will be howling for the child back 
again in three weeks’ time,” thought Lady Dolly once more. 
“ But she has done it to spite me; the old cat!” 

“Are you sorry to come to me, love?” she said, sweetly, 
meanwhile drawing Yere down beside her on a couch. 

“ I was very glad,” answered Yere. 

Lady Dolly discreetly omitted to notice the past tense. “ Ah , 
no doubt, very dear of you! It is three years since I saw you; 
for those few days at Bulmer hardly count. Bulmer is terribly 
dull, isn’t it?” 

“ I suppose it is dull; I was not so. If grandmamma had not 
been so often ” 

“ Cross as two sticks, you mean,” laughed Lady Dolly. Oh, I 
know her, my dear; the most disagreeable person that ever lived. 
The dear old duke was so nice and so handsome; but you hardly 
remember him, of course. Your grandmamma is a cat, dear — a 
cat, positively a cat! We will not talk about her. And how she 
has dressed you! It is quite wicked to dress a girl like that; it 
does her taste so much harm. You are very handsome, Yere.” 

“Yes? I am like my father, they say.” 

“Very.” 

Lady Dolly felt the mist over her eyes again, and this time 
knew it was not the prawns. She saw the sunny lawn in 
Devon, and the roses, and the little large-eyed child at her 
breast. Heavens! what a long way away all that time seemed! 

She gazed intently at Yere with a musing pathetic tenderness 
that moved the girl and made her tremble and glow, because 
at last this lovely mother of hers seemed to feel. Lady Dolly’s 
gaze grew graver and graver, more and more introspective. 

“She is thinking of the past and of my father,” thought thA 


n 


MOTHS. 


girl, tenderly, and her young heart swelled with reverent sym« 
pathy. She did not dare to break her mother’s silence. 

“ Vere,” said Lady Dolly, dreamily, at length, “ I am trying 
to think what one can do to get you decent clothes. My maid 
must run up something for you to wear to-morrow. It is a pity 
to keep you shut up all this beautitul weather, and a little life 
will do you good after that prison at Bulmer. I am sure those 
three days I was last there I thought I should have yawned till 
I broke my neck; I did, indeed, dear. She would hardly let me 
have my breakfast in my own room, and she would dine at six! 
— six! But she was never like anybody else; when even the duke 
was alive she was the most obstinate, humdrum, nasty old 
scratch-cat in the county. Such ideas, too! She was a sort of 
Wesley in petticoats, and by the way, her gowns were never 
long enough for her. But I was saying, dear, I will have Adri- 
enne run up something for you directly. She is clever. I never 
let a maid make a dress. It is absurd. You might as well want 
Rubenstein to make the piano he plays on. If she is inferior,' 
she will make you look a dowdy. If she is a really good maid, she 
will not make, she will arrange what your tailor has made, and 
perfect it — nothing more. But still, for you, Adrienne will go 
out of her way for once, She shall combine a few little things, 
and she can get a girl to sew them for her. Something to go 
out in they really must manage for to-morrow. You shall have 
brown holland if you are so fond of it, dear, but you shall see 
what brown holland can look like with Adrienne.” 

Vere sat silent. 

“By the by,” said her mother, vivaciously, “didn’t you bring 
a maid? Positively, not a maid?” 

“ Grandmamma sent Keziah; she has always done very well 
for me.” 

“ Keziah!” echoed Lady Dolly, with a shudder. “ How exact- 
ly it is like your grandmother to give you a woman called Ke- 
ziah! That horrible Fraulein one might dismiss, too, don’t you 
think? You are old enough to do without her, and you shall 
have a nice French maid; Adrienne will soon find one.” 

The girl’s eyes dilated with fear. 

“ Oh, pray do not send away the Fraulein! We are now in the 
conic sections.” 

“ The what?” said Lady Dolly. 

“I mean I could not goon in science or mathematics without 
her, and, besides, she is so good.” 

“Mathematics! science! why, what can you want to make 
yourself hateful for, like a Girton College guy?” 

“I want to know things; pray do not send away the 
Fraulein.” 

Lady Dolly, who was at heart very good-natured when her own 
comfort was not too much interfered with, patted her cheek and 
laughed. 

“ What should you want to know? — know how to dress, how 
to courtsey, how to look your best; that is all you want to know. 
Believe me, men will not ask more of you. As for your hideous 
Schroder, I think her the most odious person in existence, except. 


moths. 


10 

your grandmother. But, if her blue spectacles comfort you, 
keep her at present. Of course you will want somebody to be 
with you a good deal: I can’t be; and I suppose you’ll have to 
stay with me now. You may be seen here a little, and wherever 
I go in autumn; then you can come out in Paris in the winter, 
and be presented next spring. I shall do it in spite of your 
grandmother, who has behaved disgracefully to me— disgrace- 
fully! I believe she’d be capable of coming up to London to 
present you herself, though she’s never set foot there for fifteen 
years!” 

Vere was silent. 

“ What do you like best?” said her mother, suddenly. Some- 
thing in the girl worried her: she could not have said what it 
was. 

Yere lifted her great eyes dreamily. 

“Greek,” she answered. 

“Greek! a horse? a pony? a dog?” 

“A language,” said Vere. 

“ Of course Greek is a language; I know that,” said her mother, 
irritably. “But, of course, I thought you meant something 
natural, sensible; some pet of some kind. And what do you like 
best after that, pray?” 

“Music; Greek is like music.” 

“ Oh, dear me!” sighed Lady Dolly. 

“I can ride; I am fond of riding,” added Yere; “and I can 
shoot, and row, and sail, and steer a boat. The keepers taught 
me.” 

“Well, that sort of thing goes down rather, now that they 
walk with the guns, though I’m quite sure men wish them any- 
where all the while,” said Lady Dolly, somewhat vaguely. 
“ Only you must be masculine with it, and slangy, and you don’t 
seem to me to be that in the least. Do you know, Vere — it is a 
horrible thing to say — but I am dreadfully afraid you will be 
just the old-fashioned, prudish, open-air, touch-me-not English- 
woman! I am, indeed. Now, you know that won’t answer 
anywhere, nowadays.” 

“ Answer — what?” 

“Don’t take my words up like that; it is rude. I mean, you 
know, that kind of style is gone out altogether, pleases nobody; 
men hate it. The only woman that please nowadays are Russians 
and Americans. Why? Because in their totally different ways 
they neither of them care one fig what they do if only it please 
them to do it. They are all chic , you know. Now, you haven’t a 
bit of chic ; you look like a creature out of Burne Jones’s things, 
don’t you know, only more — more — religious-looking. You 
really look as if you were studying your Bible every minute; it 
is most extraordinary !” 

“ Her father would, read me Keble and Kempis before she was 
born,” thought Lady Dolly, angrily, her wrath rising against the 
dead man for the psychological inconsistencies in her daughter, 
— a daughter she would have been a million times better without 
at any time. 

“Weil, adieu, my lov* she said, suddenly; “you shall rida 


MOTHS . 


iff 

and you shall swim; that will certainly help you better than 
your Greek and your conic sessions, whatever they maybe: they 
sound like something about magistrates. Perhaps they have 
taught you law as well?” 

“ May I swim here?” asked Vere. 

“ Of course; it’s the thing to do. Can you dive?” 

“ Oh, yes! I am used to the water.” 

“Very well, then. But wait ; you can’t have any bathing- 
dress?” 

“ Yes. I brought it. Would you wish to see it ? Ke- 
ziah ” 

Keziah was bidden to seek for and bring out the bathing-dress, 
and after a little delay did so. 

Lady Dolly looked. Gradually an expression of horror, such 
as is depicted on the faces of those who are supposed to see 
ghosts, spread itself over her countenance and seemed to change 
it to stone. 

“That thing!” she gasped. 

What she saw was the long indigo-colored linen gown — high to 
the throat and down to the feet — of the uneducated British bather, 
whose mind has not been opened by the sweetness and light of 
continental shores. 

“ That thing!” gasped Lady Dolly. 

“ What is the matter with it?” said Vere, timidly and perplexed. 

“ Matter? It is indecent!” 

“ Indecent?” Vere colored all over the white rose-leaf beauty 
of her face. 

“ Indecent,” reiterated Lady Dolly. “ If it isn’t worse! Good 
gracious! It must have been worn at the deluge. The very chil- 
dren would stone you! Of course I knew you couldn’t have any 
decent dress. You shall have one like mine made to-morrow, and 
then you can kick about as you like. Blue and white, or blue 
and pink. You shall see mine.” 

She rang, and sent one of her maids for one of her bathing cos- 
tumes, which were many and of all hues. 

Vere looked at the brilliant object when it arrived, puzzled and 
troubled by it. She could not understand it. It appeared to be 
cut off at the shoulders and the knees. 

“ It is like what the circus-riders wear;” she said, with a deep 
breath. 

“Well, it is, now you name it,” said Lady Dolly, amused. 
“You shall have one to-morrow.” 

Vere’s face crimsoned. 

“ But what covers one’s legs and arms?” 

“ Nothing! what a little silly you are! I suppose you have 
nothing the matter with them, have you? no mark, or twist, or 
anything? I don’t remember any when you were little. You 
were thought an extraordinarily well made baby.” 

Might one then go naked provided only one had no mark or 
twist? Vere wondered, and wondered at the world into which 
She had strayed. 

“ I would never wear a costume like that,” she said, quietly, 
after a little pause. 


MOTHS . 


vt 

“ You will wear what I tell you,” said her sweet little mother, 
sharply; “and for goodness’ sake, child, don’t be a prude, what* 
ever you are. Prudes belong to Noah’s Ark, like your bathing- 
gown.” 

Vere was silent. 

“Is Mr. Vanderdecken here?” she asked, at length, to change 
the theme, and finding her mother did not speak again, who, in- 
deed, was busy, thinking what her clothes were likely to cost, 
and also whether she would arrange a marriage for her with the 

^ Duc de Tambour, son of the Prince de Chambree. The 
.fiance she could think of at the minute; but then the poor 
child had no dot. 

“ Mr. Vanderdecken?” said Lady Dolly, waking to the fact. 
“Oh, he is on the sea, going somewhere. He is always going 
somewhere; it is Java, or Japan, or Jupiter— something with a 
J. He makes his money in that sort of way, you know. I 
never understand it myself. Whenever people want money he 
goes, and he makes it because the people he goes to haven’t got 
any: isn’t it queer? Come here. Do you know, Vere, you are 
very pretty? You will be very handsome. Kiss me again dear.” 

Vere did so, learning, by a kind of intuition, that she must 
touch her mother without injuring the artistic work of the 
maids and the “ little secrets.” Then she stood silent and 
passive. 

“She is an uncomfortable girl,” thought Lady Dolly once 
more. “And, dear me, so like poor Vere! What a tall 
creature you are getting!” she said, aloud. “You will be 
married in another year.” 

“ Oh, no!” said Vere, with a glance of alarm. 

“You unnatural child! How on earth would you like to live 
if you don’t want to be married?” 

“ With the Fraulein in the country.” 

“ All your fife! And die an old maid?” 

“I should not mind.” 

Lady Dolly laughed, but it was with a sort of shock and 
shudder, as orthodox persons laugh when they hear what is 
amusing but irreverent. 

“ Why do you say such things?” she said, impatiently. “ They 
are nonsense, and you don’t mean them. ’ 

“ I mean them — quite.” 

“Nonsense!” said Lady Dolly, who never discussed with any- 
body, finding asseveration answer all purposes very much better; 
as, indeed, it does in most cases. “Well, good-bye, my love; 
you want to rest, and you can’t go out till you have something to 
wear, and I have an immense deal to do. Good-bye; you are 
very pretty!” 

“Who was that gentleman I saw?” asked Vere, as her mother 
rose and kissed her once more on her silky fair hair. “ Is he any 
relation of papa’s? He was very kind.” 

Lady Dolly colored ever so little. 

“ Oh! that’s Jack. Surely you remember seeing Jack three 
years ago at Homburg, when you came out to meet me there?” 

“ Is he a relation of ours?” 


18 


- MOTHS . 


‘‘No; not a relation exactly; only a friend.” 

“ And has he no name but Jack?” 

“ Of course. Don’t say silly things. He is Lord Jura, Lord 
Shetland’s son. He is in the Guards. A very old acquaintance^ 
dear — recollects you as a baby.” 

“ A friend of my father’s, then?” 

“Well, no, dear, not quite. Not quite so far back as that. 
Certainly he may have fagged for poor Yere at Eton perhaps, 
but I doubt it. Good-bye, darling. I will send you Adrienne. 
You may pat yourself in her hands blindly. She has perfect 
taste.” 

Then Lady Dolly opened the door, and escaped. 

Yere Herbert was left to herself. She was not tired; she was 
strong and healthful, for all the white-rose paleness of her fair 
skin; and a twelve hours tossing on the sea, and a day or two’s 
rumbling on the rail, had no power to fatigue her. Her grand- 
mother, though a humdrum and a cat, according to Lady Dolly, 
had sundry old-fashioned notions from which the girl had 
benefited both in body and mind, and the fresh strong air of 
Bulmer Chase— a breezy old forest place on the Northumberland 
sea-shore, where the morose old duchess found a dower-house to 
her taste — had braced her physically, as study and the absence of 
any sort of excitement had done mentally, and made her as un- 
like her mother as anything female could have been. The 
Duchess of Mull was miserly, cross-tempered, and old-fashioned 
in her ways and in her prejudices, but she was an upright wom- 
an, a gentlewoman, and no fool, as she would say herself. She 
had been harsh with the girl, but she had loved her and been 
just to her, and Yere had spent her life at Bulmer Chase not un- 
happily, varied only by an occasional visit to Lady Dolly, whj 
had always seemed to the child something too bright and fair to 
be mortal, and to have an enchanted existence, where caramels 
and cosaques rained, and music was always heard, and the sun 
shone all day long. 

She was all alone. The Fraulein was asleep in the next room. 
The maid did not come. The girl kneeled down by the window- 
seat and looked out through one of the chinks of the blinds. It 
was late afternoon by the sun; the human butterflies were be- 
ginning to come out again. Looking up and down, she saw the 
whole sunshiny coast, and the dancing water that was boisterous 
enough to be pretty and to swell the canvas of the yachts stand- 
ing off the shore. 

“ How bright it all looks!” she thought, with a little sigh; 
the salt, fresh smell did her good, and Bulmer, amidst its 
slowly-budding woods and dreary moors and long, dark winters, 
had keen anything but bright. Yet she felt very unhappy and 
lonely. Her mother seemed a great deal farther away than she 
had done when Yere had sat dreaming about her on the side of 
the rough heathered hills, with the herons calling across from 
one marshy pool to another. 

She leaned against the green blind, and ceased to see the sea 
and the sky, the beach and the butterflies, for a little while, her 
tears were so full under the lashes, and she did her best to keep 


MOTHS. 


19 


tihem back. She was full of pain because her mother did not 
care for her; but, indeed, why should she care? said Yere to her- 
self; they had been so little together. 

She looked, almost without seeing it at first, at the picture 
underneath her,— the stream, which gradually swelled and grew 
larger, of beautifully-dressed fairy-like women, whose laughter 
every now and then echoed up to her. It was one unbroken 
current of harmonious color, rolled out like a brilliant ribbon on 
the fawn-colored sand against the azure sea. 

“And have they all nothing to do but to enjoy themselves?” 
thought Vere. It seemed so. If Black Care were anywhere at 
Trouville, as it was everywhere else in the world, it took pains 
to wear a face like the rest and read its “ Figaro.” 

She heard the door underneath unclose, and from underneath 
the green veranda she saw her mother saunter out. Three other 
ladies were with her, and half a dozen men. They were talking 
and laughing all at once, no one waiting to be listened to or 
seeming to expect it; they walked across the beach and sat down. 
They put up gorgeous sunshades and outspread huge fans; they 
were all twitter, laughter, color, mirth. 

All this going to and fro of gay people, the patter of feet and 
flutter of petticoats, amused the girl to watch almost as much as 
if she had been amidst it. There were such a sparkle of sea, such 
a radiance of sunshine, such a rainbow of color, that, though it 
would have composed ill for a landscape, it made a pretty 
panorama. 

Yere watched it, conjecturing in a youthful, fanciful, ignorant 
way all kinds of things about the persons who seemed so happy 
there. When she had gazed for about twenty minutes, making 
her eyes ache and getting tired, one of them especially attracted 
her attention by the way in which people all turned after him as 
he passed, and the delight that his greeting appeared to cause 
those with whom he lingered. He was a man of such remark- 
able personal beauty that this alone might have been cause 
enough for the eager welcome of the listless ladies; but there 
was even a greater charm in his perfect grace of movement and 
vivacity and airy ease; he stayed little time with any one, but 
wherever he loitered a moment appeared to be the center of all 
smiles. She did not know that he was her admirer of the noon- 
day, who had looked at her as he had sauntered along in his 
bathing-shroud and his white shoes; but she watched the easy 
graceful attitudes of him with interest as he^cast himself down on 
the sand, leaning on his elbow, by a group of fair women. 

“ Can you tell me who that gentleman is?” she asked of her 
mother’s head- maid, the inimitable Adrienne. 

Adrienne looked and smiled. 

“ Oh, that is M. de Correze.” 

“ Correze 1” Vere’s eyes opened in a blaze of eager wonder, 
and the color rose in her pale cheeks, f “Correze! Are you 
sure?” v — ‘ 

“ But yes, I am quite sure,” laughed Adrienne. “Does mad 
emoiselle feel emotion at the sight of him? She is only like al> 
others of her sex. Ah! le beau Correze!” 


20 


MOTHS . 


“ I have never heard him sing,” said Vere, very low, as if she 
spoke of some religious thing; “ but I would give anything, any- 
thing, to do so. And the music he composes himself is beauti- 
ful. There is one * Messe do Minuit •” 

“Mademoiselle will hear hhn often enough when she is once 
in the world,” said Adrienne, good-naturedly. “Ah! when she 
shall see him in ‘ Faust.’ that will be an era in her life. But it is 
not his singing that makes the great ladies rave of him; it is his 
charm. Oh, quel philtre <T amour!” 

And Adrienne quite sighed with despair, and then laughed. 

Vere colored a little; Keziah did not discourse about men being 
love-philters. 

“Measure me for my clothes; I am tired,” she said, with a 
childish coldness and dignity /turning away from the window. 

“Iam entirely at mademoiselle’s service,” said Adrienne, with 
answering‘dignity. “Whoever has had the honor to clothe mad- 
emoiselle has been strangely neglectful of her highest interests.” 

“ My clothes my highest interest! I never think about them!” 

“ That is very sad. They are really farouche. If mademoiselle 
could behold herself——” 

“ They are useful,” said Vere coldly, “ that is all that is nec- 
essary.” 

Adrienne was respectfully silent, but she shuddered as if she 
had heard a blasphemy. She could not comprehend how the 
young barbarian had been brought up by a duchess. Adrienne 
had never been to Bulmer, and had never seen Her Grace of 
Mull, with her silver spectacles, her leather boots, her tweed 
clothes, her farm-ledgers, her stud-books, and her ever-open 
Bible. 

“ Measure me quickly,” said Vere. She had lowered the green 
jalousies, and would not look out any more. Yet she felt hap- 
pier. She missed dark old misty Bulmer with its oak woods by 
the ocean; yet this little gay room, with its pretty cretonne, 
cream-colored, with pale pink roses, its gilded mirrors, its rose 
china, its white muslin, was certainly brighter and sunnier, and 
who could tell but what her mother would grow to love her 
some day? 

At nine o’clock, Lady Dolly, considering herself a martyr to 
maternity, ran into the little room where Vere was at tea with 
her governess; Lady Dolly was arrayed for the evening sauterie 
at the Casino, and was in great haste to be gone. 

“Have you everything you like, darling?” she asked, pulling 
on her pearl-hued Crispins. “ Did you have a nice little dinner? 
Yes? Quite sure? Has Adrienne been to you? An excellent 
creature? Perfect taste. Dear me, what a pity! — you might 
have come and jumped about to-night if you had had only some- 
thing to wear. Of course you like dancing?” 

“ I dislike it very much.” 

“Dear me! Ah, well, you won’t say so after a cotillon or 
two. You shall have a cotillon that Louroff leads; there is 
nobody better. Good-night, my sweet Vera. Mind, I shall 
always call you Vera. It sounds so Russian and nice, and is 
much prettier than Vere.” 


MOTHS. 


21 


ff< I do not think so, mother, and I am not a Russian.” 

“ You are very contradictory and opinionated; much too opin- 
ionated for a girl. It is horrid in a girl to have opinions. 
Fraulein, how could you let her have opinions? Good-night, 
dear. I shall hardly see you to-morrow, if at all. We shall be 
cruising about in J ack’s yacht, and we shall start very early. 
The Grand Duchess will go out with us. She is great fun, only 
she does get in such a rage when she loses at play that it is horrible 
to see. So sorry you must be shut up, my poor Vera!'’ 

“ May I not go out just for a walk?” 

“ Well, I don’t know— yes, really, I think you might; if it’s 
very early, mind, and you keep out of everybody’s sight. Pray 
take care not a soul sees you.” 

“ Is not this better, then?” murmured the offender, glancing 
down on a white serge frock, which she had put on in the hope 
that it might please. It was a simple braided dress with a plain 
silver belt, and was really unobjectionable. 

Lady Dolly scanned the garment with a critical air and a parti 
pris. Certainly it might have done for the morrow’s yachting, 
but then she did not want the wearer of it on the yacht. The 
girl would have to be everywhere very soon, of course, but Lady 
Dolly put off the evil day as long as she could. 

“ It is the cut” she said, dropping her glass with a sigh. “ It 
can’t be Morgan’s?” 

“ Who is Morgan?” asked the child, so benighted that she had 
not even heard of the great Worth of nautical costume. 

“ Morgan is the only creature possible for serge,” sighed Lady 
Dolly. “ You don’t seem to understand, darling. Material is 
nothing, Make is everything. Look at our camelot and percale 
gowns that Worth sends us, and look at the satins and velvets 
of a bourgeoise from Asnieres, or a wine-merchant’s wife from 
Clapham! Oh, my dear child, cut your gown out of your dog’s 
towel or your horses’ cloths if you like, but mind Who cuts it: 
that is the one golden rule! But good-night, my sweetest. Sleep 
well,” 

Lady Dolly brushed her daugher’s cheek with the diamond 
end of her earring, and took herself off in a maze of pale yellow 
and deep scarlet as mysteriously and perfectly blended as the 
sunset colors of an Italian night. 

“She is really very pretty,” she said to her counsellor as 
he put her cloak round her and pocketed her fan. “Really, 
very handsome, like Burne Jones’ things and all that, don’t you 
know.” 

“ A long sight prettier and healthier than any of ’em,” said the 
counsellor, lighting his cigar; for he had small respect for the 
High Art of his period. 

They went forth into the moonlit night to the Casino, and left 
Vere to the sleep into which she sobbed herself like a child as she 
still was, soothed at last by the sound of the incoming tide and 
^he muttering of the good W’aulein’s- prayers. 


MOTHS . 


ae 


CHAPTER III 

Vere was awakened at five o’clock by tumultuous laughing 
gay shrill outcries, and a sudden smell of cigar-smoke. It wal. 
her mother returning home. Doors banged; then all grew still. 
Yere got up, looked at the sea, and remembered that permission 
to go out had been given her. 

In another hour she was abroad in the soft cool sunshine of 
early morning, the Channel before her, and behind her the stout 
form of Northumbrian Keziah. 

Trouvilain, as somebody has wittily called it, is not lovely. 
Were it not so celebrated, undoubtedly it would be called very 
ugly; but, in the very first light of morning, every place on 
earth, except a manufacturing city, has some loveliness, and 
Trouvilain at daybreak had some for Vere. There were yachts 
with slender, trim lines, beautiful against the clear sky. There 
were here and there provision-boats pulling out with sailors in 
dark blue jerseys, and red-capped. There were fleecy, white 
clouds, and there were cool sands; cool now, if soon they would 
be no better than powder and dust. Along the poor planks that 
are the treadmill of fashion, Yere’s buoyant young feet bore her 
with swiftness and pleasure till she reached the Corniche des 
Roches Noires, and got into the charming green country. 

; She glanced at the water, and longed to run into the shallows 
and wade and spread her limbs out, and float and swim, beating 
the sea with her slender arms and rosy toes as she had done most 
mornings in the cold, wind-swept, steel-gray northern tides of 
her old home. 

But her bathing costume had been forbidden, had even been 
carried away in bitter contempt by one of the French maids, and 
never would she go into the sea in this public place in one of 
those sleeveless, legless, circus-rider’s tunics; no, never, she said 
to herself; and her resolves were apt to be very resolute ones. 
Her old guardian at Bulmer Chase had always said to her, 
“Never say ‘no’ rashly, nor ‘yes,’ either; but when you have 
said them, stand to them as a soldier to his guns.’ 1 ’ 

She did not at all know her way, but she had thought if she 
kept along by the water she would some time or other surely get 
out of the sight of all those gay nouses, which, shut as all their 
persiennes were, and invisible as were all their occupants, yet 
had fashion and frivolity so plainly written on their coquettish 
awnings, their balconies, their doorways, their red geraniums 
and golden calceolarias blazing before their blinds. At five 
o’clock there was nobody to trouble her certainly; yet within 
light of all those windows she had felt as if she were still before 
the staring eyes and eye-glasses of the cruel crowd of that terrible 
yesterday. 

She went on quickly with the elastic step which had been used 
to cover so easily mile after mile of the heathered moors of Bus. 
mer, and the firm yellow sands by the northern ocean. Before 
the cloudless sun of *he August daybreak was much above the 


23 


MOTHS. 

waters from the east with the smoke of the first steamer from 
Havre towering gray and dark against the radiant rose of the 
sky, Vere had left Trouville, and its sleeping beauties and yawn 
ing dandies in their beds far behind her, and was nearly a third 
of the way to Villerville. She did not know anything at all about 
Lecamus fils, Jules David Challamel and Figaro, with his cabin, 
who had made Villerville famous, but she went onward because 
the sea was blue, the sand was yellow, the air was sweet and 
v, wholesome, and the solitude was complete. 

Her spirits rose; light and air and liberty of movement were 
necessary to her, for in the old woods and on the rough moors 
of Bulmer her grandmother had let her roam as she chose, on 
foot or on her pony. It had been a stern rule in other things, 
but as regarded air and exercise she enjoyed the most perfect 
freedom. 

“Are you tired, Keziah?” she cried at last, noticing that the 
patient waiting-woman lagged behind. The stout Northumbrian 
admitted that she was. She had never been so in her life before; 
but that frightful sea-journey from Southampton had left her 
stomach “orkard.” 

Vere was touched to compunction. 

“You poor creature! and I brought you out without your 
breakfast, and we have walked — oh, ever so many miles,” she 
said, in poignant self-reproach. “ Keziah, look here; there is a 
nice smooth stone. Sit down on it and rest, and I will run about. 
Yes; do not make any objection; sit down.” 

Keziah, who adored her very shadow as it fell on sward or 
sand, demurred faintly, but the flesh was weak, and the good 
woman dropped down on the stone with a heavy thud, as of a 
sack falling to earth, and sat there in plaid shawl and home- 
spun gown, with her hands on her knees, the homely sober figure 
that had seemed to Lady Dolly to have come out of the ark like 
the indigo bathing-dress. 

Vere left her on that madreporic throne, and strayed onward 
herself along by the edge of the sea. 

On one side of her was a dark bastion of rock that above, out 
of sight, bore green pastures and golden corn-fields; on the other 
was the Channel, placid, sunny, very unlike the surging, turbulent, 
gigantic waves of her old home. 

“ Can you ever be rough? Can you ever look like salt water?” 
she said with a little contempt to it, not knowing anything about 
the appalling chopping seas and formidable swell of the Channel 
which the boldest mariners detest more than all the grand furies 
of Baltic or Atlantic. But it was bright-blue water fretted with 
little curls of foam, and the low waves rolled up lazily, and 
lapped the sand at her feet; and she felt happy and playful, as 
was natural to her age; and that she was quite alone mattered 
nothing to her, for she had never had any young companions, 
and never played except with the dogs. 

She wandered about, and ran here and there, and found some 
sandpipers’ empty nests, and gathered some gorse and stuck it m 
the ribbon of her old sailor’s hat, and was gay and careless, and 
sang little soft, low songs to herself, as the swallows sing when 
they sit on the roof in mid-summer. She had taken off her hat; 


94 


MOTHS. 


the wind lifted the weighty gold of her straight-cut hair, and 
blew the old brown holland skirt away from her slender ankles. 

She began to look longingly at the water, spreading away from 
her so far and so far, and lying in delicious little cool shallows 
among the stones. She could not bathe, hut she thought she 
might wade and paddle. She took off her shoes and stockings, 
and waded in. The rock pools were rather deep, and the water 
rose above her ankles; those pretty roses and lilacs and feathery 
hyacinths of the sea that science calls actinicB uncurled their tufts 
of feathers, and spread out their starry crowns, and lifted theii 
tiny bells around her; broad ribbon- weeds floated, crabs waddled, 
little live shells sailed here and there, and all manner of algce , 
brown and red, were curling about the big stones. She was in 
paradise. 

She had been reared on the edge of the sea — the cold, dark, 
stern sea of the north, indeed, but still the sea. This was only 
a quiet, sunny nook of the French coast of the Channel, but it 
was charming from the silence, the sunshine, and the sweet 
liberty of the waters. She thought she was miles away from 
every one, and therefore was duly obeying her mother’s sole 
command. There was not even a sail in sight; quite far off was 
a cloud of dark boats, which were the fishing-cobles of Honfleur; 
there was nothing else near, nothing but a score of gulls, spread- 
ing their white wings, and diving to catch the fish as they rose. 

She waded on and on, filling an. old creel with seaweeds and 
pea-shells, for she was no more than a child in a great many 
things. The anemones she would not take, because she had no 
means of keeping them in comfort. She contented herself with 
standing nearly knee-deep and gazing down on all their glories 
peen through the glass of the still, sparkling water. She sprang 
from stone to stone, from pool to pool, forgetting Keziah seated 
on her rock. Neither did she see a pretty little dingy that was 
fastened to a stake among the bowlders. 

The air was perfectly still; there was only one sound, that of 
the incoming tide running up and rippling over the pebbles. 

Suddenly a voice from the w aves, as it seemed, began to 
chaunt parts of the Requiem of Mozart. It was a voice pure as 
a lark’s, rich as an organ’s swell, tender as love’s first embrace, 
marvelously melodious — in a word, that rarity which the earth 
is seldom blessed enough to hear from more than one mortal 
throat in any century; it was a perfectly beautiful tenor voice. 

Vere was standing in the water, struck dumb and motionless; 
ber eyes dilated, she scarcely breathed, every fiber of her being, 
everything in her, body and soul, seemed to listen. She did not 
•once wonder whence it came; the surpassing beauty and melody 
of it held her too entranced. 

Whether it were in the air, in the water, in the sky, she never 
asked: one would have seemed as natural to her as the other. 

From the Requiem it passed with scarce a pause to the impas- 
sioned songs of Gounod’s Romeo. Whatever the future may say 
of Gounod, this it will never be able to deny, that he is 
the supreme master of the utterances of Love. The paa* 


MOTHS. 


25 


sionate music rose into the air, bursting upon the silence and 
into the sunlight, and seeming to pierce the very heavens, then 
sinking low and sweet and soft as any lover’s sigh of joy, break- 
ing off at last abruptly and leaving nothing but the murmur of 
the sea. 

The girl drew a great breathless cry, as if something beautiful 
were dead, and stood quite still, her figure mirrored in the shal- 
lows. 

The singer came round from the projecting ledge of the brown 
cliffs, uncovered his head and bowed low, with apology for un- 
witting intrusion on her solitude. 

It was he whom Adrienne had called le philtre d' amour. 

Then the girl, who had been in heaven, dropped to earth, and 
remembered her wet and naked feet, and glanced down on them 
with shame, and colored as rosy-red as the sea-flowers in the 
pool. 

She threw an eager glance over the sands. Alas! she had for- 
gotten her shoes and stockings, and the place where they had 
been knew them no more; the waves had rippled over them and 
were tossing them, Heaven could tell how near or far away. 

The “ sad leaden humanity,” which drags us all to earth, 
brought her from the trance of ecstasy to the very humblest 
prose of shame and need. 

“I have lost them,” she murmured, and then felt herself grow 
from rose to scarlet, as the singer stood on the other side of the 
pool gazing at her and seeing her dilemma with amusement. 

“ Your shoes and stockings, mademoiselle?” 

He was so used to seeing pretty nude feet at Trouville that it 
was impossible for him to measure the awful character of the 
calamity in the eyes of Yere. 

“ Yes, I took them off; and I never dreamt that any one was 
here.” 

“ Perhaps you have only forgotten where you put them. Let 
me have the honor to look for your lost treasures.” 

Vere stood in her shallow, among the ribbon-weed, with her 
head hung down, and the color burning in her face. All her 
pride, of which she had much, could not avail her here. She 
was nervously ashamed and unhappy. 

The new-comer searched ardently and indefatigably, leaving no 
nook of rock or little deposit of sea-water unexamined. He 
waded in many places, and turned over the weed in all, but it 
was in vain. The sea was many an inch deeper over tho shore 
than when she had first come, and her shoes and hose were 
doubtless drifting loose upon the waves; there was no trace of 
them. 

Unconscious of this tragedy enacting, Keziah sat in the calm 
distance, a gray and brown figure, facing the horizon. 

Vere stood all the while motionless, the sweet singing seeming 
still to throb and thrill through the air around, and the sunny 
daylight seeming to go round her in an amber mist, through 
which she only saw her own two naked feet, still covered, in 
some sort, by the water and the weeds. 

“ They are gone, mademoiselle l" said the singer, coming to her 


MOTHS . 


56 

with eye* that he made most tender and persuasive. They were 
beautiful eyes, that lentlthemselves with willingness to this famil- 
iar office. 

“ They must have been washed away by the tide; it is coming 
higher each moment. Indeed, you must not remain where you 
are, or you will be surrounded very soon and carried off yourself. 
These Channel tides are treacherous and uncertain.” 

“ I will go to my maid,” murmured Vere, with a fawn-like 
spring from her stones to others, forgetting in her shame to even 
thank him for his services. 

“ To that admirable person enthroned yonder?” said the singer 
of the songs. ■' ■“ But, mademoiselle, there is the deep sea between 
you and her already. Look!” 

Indeed, so rapidly had the tide run in, and the waters swelled 
up, that she was divided from her attendant by a broad sheet of 
blue shallows. Keziah, tired and sleepy from her journeyings, 
was nodding unconsciously on her throne of rocks. 

“ And she will be drowned!” said Yere, with a piercing cry, 
and shejbegan wading knee-deep into the sea before her com- 

E anion knew what she was about. In a moment he had caught 
er and lifted her back on to the firm sand. 

“Your good woman is in no danger, but you cannot reach 
her so, and you will only risk your own life, mademoiselle,” he 
said, gently. “There is nothing to be alarmed about. Shout 
to your attendant to take the patli up the cliffs — perhaps she 
would not understand me — and we will take this road ; so we 
shall meet on the top of this table-land that is now above our 
heads. That is all. Shout loudly to her.” 

Vere was trembling, but she obeyed — she had learned the too 
oft forgotten art of obedience at Bulmer Chase — and she shouted 
loudly till she aroused Keziah, who awoke, rubbing her eyes, 
and dreaming, no doubt, that she was in the servants’ hall at 
Bulmer. 

When she understood what had happened and what she was 
bidden to do, the stout North-countrywoman tucked up her pet- 
ticoats, and began to climb up the steep path with a will, once 
assured that her young mistress was out of all danger. The face 
of the cliff soon hid her figure from sight, and Vere felt her 
heart sink strangely. 

But she had no time to reflect, for the stranger propelled her 
gently toward the worn ridge in the rocks near them, a path 
which the fisher-people had made in coming up and down. 

“ Let us mount quickly, mademoiselle. I did not notice my- 
self that the tide was so high. Alas! I fear the rocks will hurt 
your feet. When we reach the first ledge you must wind some 
grass round them. Come!” 

Vere began to climb. The stones and the sand and the rough 
dry weeds cut her feet terribly, but these did not hurt her so much 
as the idea that he saw her without shoes and stockings. Reach- 
ing a ledge of stone, he bade her sit down, and tore up some broad 
grasses and brought them to her. 

“Bind these about your feet,” he said, kindly, and turned his 
feack to her, “ Ah! why will you mind so much? Madame, your 


MOTHS. 


27 


lovely mother dances about so for two or three hours in the water- 
carnival every noonday!” 

“ Do you know my mother?” said Vere, lifting her face, very 
hot and troubled from winding the grass about her soles and in- 
steps. 

“ I have had that honor for many years in Paris. You will 
have heard of me, perhaps. I am a singer.” 

V ere, for the first time, looked in his face, and saw that it was 
the face whose beauty had attracted her in the sunlight on the 
shore, and whom Adrienne had called the philtre d’ amour. 

“ It was you who were singing, then?” she said, timidly, and 
thinking how beautiful and how wonderful he was, this great 
artist, who stood before her clothed in white, with the sun shin- 
ing in Lis luminous eyes. 

“Yes. I came here to bathe and to swim, and then run over 
some of the scores of a new opera, that we shall have in Paris 
this winter, of Ambroise Thomas’. One cannot study in peace 
for ten minutes in Trouville. You love music, mademoiselle? 
Oh, you need not speak; one always knows.” 

“ I never went to any opera,” said Yere under her breath, re- 
suming her climb up the rock. 

“ Never! May I sing to you, then, in the first opera you hear ! 
Take care ; this path is steep. Do not look back ; and catch at 
the piles where the guindeaux hang. You need fear nothing. I 
am behind you.” 

Yere climbed on in silence; the thick bands of grass protected 
her feet in a measure, yet it was hard and rough work. Young 
and strong though she was, she was glad when they reached the 
short grass on the head of the cliffs and sank down on it, field- 
fares and several birds of all kinds wheeling around her in the 
gray clear air. 

“ You are not faint?*’ he asked, anxiously. 

“ Oh, no! Only tired.” 

“ Will you rest here ten minutes, and I will comeback to you?” 

“ If you wish me.” 

He smiled at the childish docility of the answer, and left hen 
whilst she leaned down on the turf of the table-land, and gaze<* 
at the sea far down below, and at the horizon where many a 
white sail shone, and here and there streamed the dark trail of & 
steamer’s smoke. She had forgotten Keziah for the moment; 
she was only hearing in memory those wonderful tones, clear a0 
a lark’s song, rich as an organ’s swell, ringing over the waters m 
the silence. 

In less than ten minutes he was back at her side with a pair oC 
little new wooden shoes in his hand. 

“ I thought these might save you from the stones and dust B 
little, Mademoiselle Herbert,” he said, “ and it is irr possible tc 
procure any better kind in this village. Will you try jhem ?” 

She was grateful; the little shoes were a child’s size, and fitted 
as if they had been the glass slipper of Cinderella. 

“You are very good,” she said, timidly. “ And how can you 
tell what my name is?’* 


* MOTHS . 


28 

“ I witnessed your arrival yesterday. Besides, who has not 
heard of lovely Madame Dolly’s daughter ?” 

Yere was silent. She vaguely wondered why her mother was 
called Dolly by all men whatever. 

Suddenly, with a pang of conscience, she remembered Keziah, 
and sprang up on her sabots. Correze divined her impulse and 
her thought. 

“Your good woman is quite safe,” he said: “the peasants 
have seen her on the top of the rocks, but she seems to have 
taken a wrong path, and so it may be half an hour before we 
overtake her. But do not be afraid or anxious. I will see you 
safely homeward.” 

Yere grew very pale. 

“ But my mother made me promise to see no one.” 

“Why?” 

“ Because my dress is all wrong. And poor Keziah ! — oh, how 
frightened she will be !” 

“Not very. We shall soon overtake her. Or, better still, I 
will send a lad after her while we rest a little. Come and see my 
village, if you can walk in your sabots. It is a village that I 
have discovered, so I have the rights of Selkirk. Come, if you 
are not too tired. Brava!” 

He cried “brava!” because she walked so well in her wooden 
shoes; and he saw that to please him she was overcoming the 
timidity which the solitude of her situation awoke in her. 

“ How can she be the daughter of that impudent fine mouche ?* 
he thought. 

Yere was shy but brave. Lady Dolly and her sisterhood were 
audacious but cowardly. 

He led her across the broad, hard head of the cliffs, mottled 
black and gray where the rock broke through the grass, and 
thence across a sort of rambling down with low furze-bushes 
growing on it, further by a cart-track, where cart-wheels had 
cut deep into the soil, to a little cluster of houses, lying sheltered 
from the sea- winds by the broad bluff of the cliffs which rose 
above them and gathered under the shelter of apple and cherry- 
trees, with one great walnut growing in the midst. 

It was a poor little village enough, with a smell of tar from 
the fishing nets and sails spread out to dry, and shingle roofs 
held down with stones, and little dusky close-shut pigeon-holes 
for windows; but in the memory of Yere forever afterward 
that little village seemed even as Arcadia. 

He had two wooden chairs brought out, and a wooden table, 
and set them under the cherry-trees, all reddened then with 
fruit. He had a wooden bowl of milk, and honey, and brown 
bread, and cherries, brought out, too. There were lavender and 
a few homely stocks and wall-flowers growing in the poor soil 
about the fences of the houses; bees hummed, and swallows cleft 
the air. 

“You are thirsty and hungry, I am sure,” he said, and Yere, 
who had not learned to be ashamed of such things, said, with a 
•mile, “lam.” 

He had reassured her as to Keziah, after whom he had sent 9 


MOTHS . 


29 


fish fir-boy. That the fisher-boy would ever find Keziah he did 
not in the least see any reason to believe; but he did not see any 
reason either why he should tell Vere so, to make her anxious 
and disturbed. The girl had such a lovely face, and her innocence 
and seriousness pleased him. 

“ Are you sure the boy will soon find my woman?” she asked 
of him, wistfully. 

“Quite sure,” he answered. “He saw her himself, a little 
while ago, on the top of the cliff yonder. Do not be dismayed 
about that, and find some appetite for this homely fare. I have 
made requisitions like any Prussian, but the result is poorer than 
I hoped it might be. Try some cherries.” 

The cherries were fine biggaroons, scarlet and white, and Yere 
was still a child. She drank her milk and ate them with keen 
relish. The morning was growing warm as the sun clomb higher 
in the heavens. She took off her hat, and the wind lifted the 
hick hair falling over her forehead; exertion and excitement 
lad brought a flush of color in her cheeks; the light and shade 
of the walnut leaves was above her head; little curly-headed 
children peeped behind the furze fence and the sweet-brier hedge; 
white-capped old women looked on, nodding and smiling; the sea 
was out of sight, but the sound and the scent of it came there. 

“ It is an idyl,” thought her companion: idyls were not in his 
life, which was one of unending triumphs, passions, and festivals, 
dizzily mingled in a world which adored him. Meanwhile it 
pleased him, if only by force of novelty, and no incident on earth 
could ever have found him unready. 

“ You love music?” he cried to her. “Ah! now if we were 
but in Italy in that dark little cottage there would be sure to be 
a chitarra, and I would give you a serenade to your cherries — 
perhaps without one: why not, if you like it? But first, Made- 
moiselle Herbert, I ought to tell you 'zrho £ am.” 

“ Oh, I know,” said Yere, and lifted her soft eyes to him with 
a cherry against her lips. 

“ Indeed?” 

“ Yes, I saw you on the plage yesterday, and Adrienne told me. 
You are Correze.” 

She said the name tenderly and reverently, for his fame had 
reached her in her childhood, and she had often thought to her- 
self, “ If only I could hear Correze once!” 

He smiled caressingly. 

“ I am glad that you cared to ask. Yes, I am Correze, that is 
certain; and perhaps Correze would be the name of a greater ar- 
tist if the world had not spoilt him— your mamma’s world, 
mademoiselle. Well, my life is very happy, and very gay and 
glad, and after all the fame of the singer can never be but a 
breath, a sound through a reed. When our lips are once shut 
there is on us forever eternal silence. Who can remember a sum* 
mer breeze when it has passed by, or tell in any after-time how 
a laugh or a sigh sounded?” 

His face grew for the moment sad and overcast — that beautiful 
face which had fascinated the eyes of the girl as they had dorw 


MOTHS. 


the gaze of multitudes in burning nights of enthusiasm 
Neva to Tagus, from Danube to Seine. 

Vere looked at him and did not speak. The face of Correze had 
a magic for all women, and she vaguely felt that magic as she 
met those eyes that were the eyes of Romeo and of Faust. 

“What a lovely life it must be, your life!” she said, timidly. 
“ It must be like a perpetual poem, I think.” 

Correze smiled. 

“ An artist’s life is far off what you fancy it, I fear; but yet at 
the least it is full of color and of change. I am in the snows of 
Russia one day, in the suns of Madrid another. I know the life 
of the palaces, I have known the life of the poor. When I for- 
get the latter, may Heaven forget me! Some day when we are 
older friends, Mademoiselle Herbert, I will tell you my story.” 

; “ Tell me now,” said Vere, softly, with her gaze beginning to 
grow intent and eager under the halo of her hair, and letting her 
cherries lie unheeded on her lap. 

Correz laughed. 

“ Oh, you will be disappointed. I have not much of one, and 
it is no secret. I am Raphael de Correze; I am the Marquis de 
Correze, if it were of any use to be so; but I prefer to be Cor- 
reze the singer. It is much simpler, and yet much more uncom- 
mon. There are so many marquises, so few tenors. My race 
was great among the old noblesse de Savoie, but it was beggared 
in the Terror, and their lands were confiscated, and most of their 
lives were taken. I was born in a cabin; my grandfather had 
been bom in a castle; it did not matter. He was a philosopher 
and a scholar, and he had taken to the mountains and loved 
them. My father married a peasant-girl, and lived as simply as 
a shepherd. My mother died early. I ran about barefoot and 
saw to the goats. We were on the French side of the Pennine 
Alps. I used to drive the goats up higher, higher, higher, 
as the summer drew on and the grass was eaten down. In 
the winter an old priest who lived with us, and my father, when 
he had leisure, taught me. We were very poor, and often hungry, 
but they were happy times. I think of them when I go across 
the Alps, wrapped up in my black sables that the Empress of 
Russia has given me. I think I was warmer in the old days with 
the snow ten feet deep all around! Can you understand that 
snow may be warmer than sables? Yes? Well, there is little to 
tell. One day, when it was summer, and travelers were coming 
up into the Pennine valleys, some one heard me sing, and said 
my voice was a fortune. I was singing to myself and the goats 
among the gentian, the beautiful blue gentian — you know it? 
No, you do not know it, unless you have roamed the Alps in May. 
Other persons came after him, and said the same thing, and 
wanted me to go with them; but I would not leave my father. 
Who could stack wood for him, and cut paths through the snow, 
and rake up the chestnuts and store them? I did all that. I 
would not go. When I was fifteen he died. ‘ Do not forget you 
are the last Marquis de Correze,’ he said to me with his last 
breath. He had never forgotten it, and he had lived and died in 
the shadow of the Alps an honest man and a gentleman in his 


MOTHS. 


31 


mountain hut. I passed the winter in great pain and trouble ; 
it had been in the autumn that he had died. I could not re- 
solve whether it would displease him in his grave under the 
snow that a Correze should be a singer; yet a singer I longed 
to be. With the spring I said to myself that after all one could 
be as loyal a gentleman as a singer, as a soldier; why not? I 
rose up and walked down to the bottom of our ravine, where 
twice a week the diligences for Paris run; I found one going 
on the road ; I went by it, and went on, and on until I entered 
Paris. Ah! that entry into Paris of the boy with an artist’s 
ambition and a child’s faith in destiny! Why have they never 
written a poem on it? Once in Paris, my path was easy; my 
voice made me friends. I went to Italy, I studied, I was heard, 
I returned to my dear Paris and triumphed. Well, I have 
been happy ever since. It is very much to say; and, yet some- 
times I long for the old winter nights, roasting the chestnuts, 
with the wall of snow outside!” 

Vere had listened with eloquent dim eyes and a fast-beating 
heart, her cherries lying still uneaten on her lap. She gave 
a little quiet sigh as his voice ceased. 

“You feel so about it because your father is dead,” she said, 
very low under her breath. “If he were here to know all your 
triumphs, ” 

Correze bent down and touched her hand, as it hung forward 
over her knee, with his lips. It was a mere habitual action 
of graceful courtesy with him, but it gave the child a strange 
thrill. She had never seen these tender easy ceremonies of 
the South. He saw he had troubled her, and was sorry. 

“Eat your cherries, Mademoiselle Herbert, and I will sing 
you a song,” he said, gayly, dropping a cherry into his own 
mouth, and he began to hum in his perfect melodious notes 
odds and ends of some of the greatest music of the world. 

Then he sang, with a voice only raised to one-tenth of its 
power, the last song of Fernando, his lips scarcely parting as 
he sang, and his eyes looking away to the yellow gorse and 
the sheep-cropped grass and the drifting clouds; giving to the 
air and sea what he often refused to princes. 

For the great tenor Correze was a prince himself in his 
caprices. 

The perfect harmony that held multitudes enthralled and 
moved whole cities to ecstasies, that dissolved queens in tears 
and made women weep like little children, was heard on the 
still sunny silence of the cliffs with only a few babies tum- 
bling in the sandy grass, and an old woman or two sitting 
spinning at her door. Down in gay Trouville all his wor- 
shipers could not woo from him a note; the entreaties that 
were commands found him obdurate and left him indifferent; 
and he sang here to the lark that was ringing over his head, 
because a girl of sixteen had lost her shoes and stockings and 
he wished to console her. 

When once the voice left his lips he sang on, much as the lark 
did, softly and almost unconsciously, the old familiar melodies 
following one another unbidden, as in his childhood he had used 


MOTHS. 


k sing to the goats with the flush of the Alpine roses about his 
feet and the snow above his head. 

The lark dropped, as though owning itself vanquished, into 
the hollow, where its consort’s lowly nest was made. Correze 
ceased suddenly to sing, and looked at his companion. Yere was 
crying. 


“ Ah! my beautiful angel!” said an old peasant woman to him, 
Branding close against the furze fence to listen; “ do you come 
out of Paradise to tell us we are not quite forgot there?” 

Yere said nothing; she only turned on him her great soft eyes, 
whilst the tears were falling unchecked down her cheeks. 

“Mademoiselle,” said Correze, “I have had flattery in my 
time, and more than has been good for me; but who ever gave 
ine such sweet flattery as yours?” 

“ Flattery!” murmured Yere. “ I did not mean — oh, how can 
you say that? The woman is right; it is as if it came from the 
angels!” 

“By a servant of angels most unworthy, then,” said Correze, 
with a smile and a sigh. “As for the woman — good mother, 
here is a gold piece that carries Paradise in it; or at least men 
think so. But I am afraid, myself, that by the time we have 
lound the gold pieces we have most of us forgotten the way to 
Paradise.” 

Yere was silent. She was still very pale; the tears stood on her 
lashes as the rain stands on the fringes of the dark passion- 
flower after a storm. 


“ Tell me your name, my angel!” said the old woman, with her 
hand on the coin. 

“Raphael.” 

“ I will pray to St. Raphael for you; if indeed you be not he?” 

“Nay; I am not he. Pray always, good soul; it is pleasant 
to think that some one prays for us. Those cries cannot all be 
lost.” 

“ Have you none to love you ?” said the old woman. “ That is 
odd, for you are beautiful.” 

“ I have many to love me — in a way. But none to pray that* 
I know of; that is another affair. Mother, did you see that lark 
that sang on against me, and dropped to its nest at Iasi? :: 

“ I saw it.” 

“Then have a heed that the boys do not stone and the trappers 
net it. 

“ I will. What is your fancy ?” 

“ It is a little brother.” 

< The peasant woman did not understand, but she nodded three 
times. “ The lark shall be safe as a king in his court. The plot 
he is in is mine. When you want a thing, say to women you wish 
it; you do not want to say anything else.” 

Correze laughed, and pulled down a rose from behind the 
•weet-brier. He held it out to Vere. 

“ If there were only a single rose here and there upon earth, 
men and women would pass their years on their knees before its 
beauty. I wonder sometimes if human ingratitude for beauty 


MOTHS. 83 

ever hurts God? One might fancy even Deity wounded by neg- 
lected gifts. What do you say ?” 

He plucked a little lavender and some sea-pinks, and wound 
them together with the rose. 

“ When the fools throw me flowers they hurt me; it is bar- 
barous, v he said. “To throw laurel has more sense; there is 
a bitter smell in it, and it carries a sound allegory; but flowers \ 
—flowers thrown in the dust and dying in the gas glare ! The 
little live birds thrown at Carnival are only one shade worse. 
Ah ! here is the lad that I sent to find your waiting-woman.” 

The rose, the song, the magical charm, seemed all dissolved 
before Vere as by the speaking of some disenchanter’s spell; the 
hardness and fearfulness of prosaic fact faced her. 

The fisher-lad explained that he had been miles in search of 
the good woman, but he had not found her. Men he had lately 
met had told him they had seen such a figure running hard 
back to the town. 

“ What shall I do ?” she murmured aloud. “ I have beeu for- 
getting all the trouble that I* have been to you. Show me the 
way back — only that; I can find it — I can go alone. Indeed I 
can, M. de Correze.” 

‘Indeed you will do nothing of the kind,” said Correze. 
“ Your woman is quite safe, you see, so you need fear nothing 
for her. No doubt she thinks you have gone that way home. 
Mademoiselle Herbert, if you will listen to me, you will not 
distress yourself, but let me take you in my little boat that is 
down there to Trouville. It is impossible that you should 
walk in those wooden shoes, and carriage or even cart there is 
none here. Come, it is half-past nine only now. The sun is 
still temperate; the sea is smooth. Come, I will row you home 
in an hour.” 

“ But I have been such a trouble to you.” 

“ May I never have worse burdens!” 

61 And my mother will be so angry.” 

“Will she? Madame Dolly, a mother and angry? I cannot 
picture it; and I thought I knew her in every phase. My child, 
do not be so troubled about nothing. We will drift back slowly 
and pleasantly, and you shall be in your mother’s house before 
noon strikes. And every one knows me. That is one of the 
uses of notoriety; it has many drawbacks, so it need have some 
compensations. Come. I rowed myself out here. I studied 
music a year in Venice when I was a lad, and learned rowing on 
the Lido from the fruit girls. Come.” 

She did not resist much more; she thought that he must know 
best. With the gray lavender and the rose at her throat, she 
went away from under the cherry-trees; the old woman in her 
blue gown gave them her blessing; the lark left his nest and began 
to sing again; the sunny hour was over, the black steep head of 
the cliffs was soon between them and the little hamlet. 

They walked down by an easier way to the shore. The little 
boat was rocking on a high tide- 

“ Can you steer?” said Correze. 

“ Oh, yes,” said Vere, who was learned m all sailing and boat- 


84 MOTHS. 

ing, after a childhood passed by the rough gray waters of an iron 
coast. 

He took the oars, and she the ropes. The sea was smooth and 
there was no wind, not even a ruffle in the air; the boat glided 
slowly and evenly along. 

He talked and laughed, he amused and beguiled .her; he told 
her stories; now and then he sang low sweet snatches of Venetian 
boat-songs and rowing-chants of the Lombard lakes, and of the 
j Riviera gulfs and bays; the sun was still cool; the sea looked blue 
I to her eye3 which had never beheld the Mediterranean. There 
were many crafts in sight, pleasure and fishing-vessels, and far- 
ther away large ships; but nothing drew near them save one old 
coble going in to Etretat from the night’s dredging. It was an 
enchanted voyage to Vere, as the hamlet on the cliffs, and the 
homely lavender, and the cabbage-rose, had been all enchanted 
things. She was in a dream. She wondered if she were really 
living. As she had never read but great and noble books, she 
thought vaguely of the Faerie Queen and of the Fata Morgana. 
And through the sunlight against the sea, she saw as in a golden 
halo the beautiful, brilliant, dreamy face of Correze. 

At last the voyage was done. 

The little boat grated against the sands of Trouville, and 
against the side of a yacht’s gig waiting there, with smart sailors 
in white jerseys and scarlet caps, with “ Ephemeris ” in large 
blue letters woven on their shirts. 

It was still early, earlier than it was usual for the fashionable 
idleness of the place to be upon the shore; and Correze had 
hoped to run his boat in on land unnoticed. But, as the crankr 
ness of fate would have it, several people had been wakened 
before their usual hour. The yachts of a great Channel race, 
after having been all night out toward the open ocean, had hove 
in sight on their homeward tack, and were objects of interest, as 
heavy bets were on them. Correze, to his annoyance, saw 
several skiffs and canoes already out upon the water round him, 
and several poppy-colored and turquoise-colored stripes adorning 
the bodies of human beings, and moving to and fro, some on the 
sand, some in the surf, some in the deeper sea. 

There was no help for it, he saw, but to run the boat in, and 
trust to chance to take his companion unnoticed across the few 
hundred yards that separated the shore from the little house of 
Lady Dolly. 

But chance chose otherwise. 

As he steered through the still shallow water, and ran the boat 
up on the sand, there were some human figures, like gayly- 
painted pegtops, immediatlv swarming down toward him, and 
among them Lady Dolly herself; Lady Dolly with a penthouse- 
like erection of straw above her head to keep the sun off, and her 
body tightly encased in black and yellow stripes, till she looked 
like a wasp, — if a wasp had ever possessed snowy arms quite bare 
and bare white legs. 

Correze gave his hand to Vere to alight, and she set her little 
wooden shoes upon the dusty shore, and did not look up. The 
gulden clouds seemed all about her still, and she was wondering 


MOTHS. 8$ 

what she could ever say to him to thank him enough for all his 
care. 

A peal of shrill laughter pierced her ear and broke her musing. 

“ Correze, what nymph or naiad have you found? A mermaid 
in sabots! Oh! oh! oh!” 

The laughter pealed and shieked, as fashionable ladies’ laughtel 
will, more often than is pretty; and then through the laughter 
she heard her mother’s voice. 

“ Ah — ha! Correze! So this is why you steal away from sup* 
per when the daylight comes?” 

Correze, surrounded by the swarming and parti -colored peg- 
tops, lifted his head, comprehended the situation, and Wwed to 
the ground. 

“I have the honor and happiness, madame, to be of a slight 
service to Mademoiselle Herbert.” 

The group of pegtops was composed of Lady Dolly, the 
Princesse Helene, a Princess Zephine, three other ladies, and 
several gentlemen, just come to the edge of the sea to bathe. 

Yere gave one amazed glance at her mother and blushed scar- 
let. The glance and the blush were not for the shame of her 
own misdoings; they were for the shame of her mother’s attire. 
Yere. who had been overwhelmed with confusion at the loss of 
her shoes, was very far from comprehending the state of feeling 
which adopts a fashionable swimming-costume as perfect pro- 
priety, and skips about in the surf hand-in-hand with a male 
swimmer, the cynosure of five hundred eye-glasses and lorgnons. 

She had seen the bathing-dress indeed, but, though she had 
perceived that it was legless and armless, she had imagined that 
something must be worn with it to supplement those deficiencies, 
and she had not in any way reckoned the full enormity of it as it 
had hung limp over the back of a chair. 

But on her mother! 

As the group of living human pegtops swarmed before her on 
the edge of the sea, and she realized that it was actually her 
mother, actually her dead father’s wife, who was before her, 
with those black and yellow stripes for all her covering, Yer© 
felt her cheeks and brow burn all over as with fire. They 
thought she was blushing with shame at herself, but she was 
blushing for shame for them, and those tight- drawn rainbow- 
colored stripes that showed every line of the form more than the 
kilted skirts and scant rags of the fisher-girls ever showed theirs. 
If it were right to come down to dance about in the water with 
half a dozen men around, how could that which she had done 
herself be so very wrong? The sea and the sands and the sky 
seemed to go round with her. She was only conscious of the 
anger sparkling from her mother’s eyes; she did not heed the 
tittering and the teasing with which the other ladies surrounded 
her companion. 

“ Yere!” Lady Dolly for a moment said nothing more. She 
stood blankly staring at her daughter, at the sunburnt hat, the 
tumbled hair, the wooden shoes, and at the figure of Correze 
against the sun. 

“You — with Correze!” she cried, at length; and Correze, 


86 worm. 

studying her pretty little face, thought how evil pretty women 
could sometimes look. 

“ Mademoiselle Herbert had lost her maid, and her road, and 
her shoes,” he hastened to say, with his most charming grace; 
“ I have been happy enough to be of a little — too little — service to 
her. The fault was none of hers; but all of the tide; and, save 
the loss of the shoes, there is no mischief done.” 

“ M. Correze has wasted his morning for me, and has been so 
very kind,” said Vere. Her voice was very low, but it was steady. 
She did not think she had done any wrong, but she felt be- 
wildered, and was not quite sure. 

Her mother laughed very irritably. 

“Correze is always too kind, and always ft preux chevalier . 
What on earth have you been doing, darling? and where are 
your women? and how ever could you be so quite too dreadfully 
foolish. I suppose you think life is like Alice in Wonderland? 
Jack, see her home, will you ? and join us at the yacht, and lock 
her up in her room, and the German with her. How good of 
you, dear Correze, to bore yourself with a troublesome child ! 
If it were anybody else except you who had come ashore like 
this with my Vera, I should feel really too anxious and angry. 
But, with you ” 

“Madame, I am too fortunate! If you deem me to be of any 
use, however, let me claim, as a guerdon, permission to attend 
mademoiselle, your daughter, to her home.” 

“ Jack, see her home, pray. Do you hear me?” said Lady Dolly 
again, sharply. “ No, not you, Correze, you are quite too charm- 
ing to be trusted. Jack’s like an old woman.” 

The Princess Helene smiled at the Princess Zephine. 

If old women are thirty years old, handsome in a fair, bold 
breezy fashion, and six feet three in height, then was Lord Jura 
like them. He had come ashore from the “ Ephemeris,” and 
was the only one in the party decently clad. 

“ Why should she go home?” muttered Jura. “ Why may she 
not come with us — eh?” 

“ Out of the question,” said Lady Dolly, very sharply. 

He was a silent man; he said nothing now; he strode off si- 
lently to Vere’s side, lifting his straw hat a little, in sign of his 
acceptance of his devoir. Correze bowed very low with his ow 
matchless grace and ease, and did not attempt to follow them. 

Vere made an inclination to her mother and the other ladiey 
with the somewhat stately deference which had been imposed cn 
her at Bulmer chase, and began to move toward the Chalet Lu- 
doff, whose green blinds and gilded scroll were visible in the dis- 
tance. 

“No, not you, Correze; I cannot permit it. You are too fa s- 
cinatiag — infinitely too fascinating to play chaperon,” cried Lady 
Dolly, once more. “ Vera, when you get home, go to your room 
and stay there till I come. You have had enough liberty to-day, 
and have abused it shamefully.” 

Having screamed that admonition on the air, Lady Dolly 
turned to her friends the feminine pegtops, and entreated them 


MONTHS. r 37 

dot to think too badly of her naughty little puss — she was so 
young. 

In a few moments all the pegtops had jumped into the water, 
and the young Due de Din ant was teaching Lady Doily to exe- 
cute in the waves a new dance just introduced in an operetta of 
Messieurs Meilhac and Herve — a dance that required prodigious 
leaps and produced boisterous laughter. Vere did not look back 
once; she felt very ashamed still, but not of herself. 

Jura did not address a word to her, except when they had ap- 
proached the steps of the Chalet Ludoff; then he said, somewha 
sheepishly, “ I say — if she’s nasty don’t you mind. She can be; 
but it soon blows over ” 

Yere was silent. 

“ Won’t you come out to-day?” he pursued. “ I do so wish 
you would. It’s my tub, you know, and you would like it. Do 
come.” 

“ Where?” 

“ On my yacht. We are going to picnic at Villiers. The grand 
duchess is coming, and she is great fun, when she isn’t too drunk. 
Why shouldn’t you come? It seems to me you are shut up like 
& nun. It’s not fair.” 

“ My mother does not wish me to come anywhere,” said Vere, 
dreamily, heeding him very little. “ There is the house. Go 
back to them, Lord Jura. Thanks.” 

Jura went back, but not until he had sent her up a pretty little 
breakfast, and the most innocent of his many French novels. 

“It’s a beastly shame,” he said, as he walked toward the 
swimmers over the sands. 

Correze, meanwhile, who had resisted all entreaties to bathe, 
and all invitations to pass the day on the “ Ephemeris,” wended 
his way slowly toward his hotel. 

“ She has claws, that pretty cat,” he said to himself, thinking 
of Lady Dolly. He had never much liked her, and he detested 
her now in a petulent, impetuous way that now and then broke 
up the sunny softness of his temper. 

“How sweet she is now! sweet as the sweet-brier and a« 
healthy,” he thought to himself. “How clear the soul, hew 
clear the eyes! If only that would last! But one little year in 
the world, and it will be all altered. She will have gained some 
chic, no doubt, and some talent and tact; she will wear high- 
heeled shoes, and she will have drawn in her waist, and learned 
how to porter le sein en offrande, and learned how to make 
those grand gray eyes look languid, and lustrous, and terrible. 
Oh, yes, she will have learned all that. But then, alas! alas! she 
will have learned so much too. She will have learned what the 
sickly sarcasms mean, and the wrapt-up pruriencies intend, 
and what women and men are worth, and how politics 
are knavish tricks, and the value of a thing is just as 
much as it will bring, and all the rest of the dreary gospel of 
self. What a pity! what a- pity! But it is always so. I dare 
say she will never stoop to folly as her pretty mother does; but 
the bloom will go. She will be surprised, shocked, pained; then, 
little by little she will get >vsed to it all — they all do — and then 




MOTHS. 


the world will have her, body and soul, and perhaps will put a 
bit of ice where that tender heart now beats. She will be a great 
lady, I dare say — a very great lady— nothing worse, very 
likely; but, all the same, my sweet-brier will be withered, and 
my white wild rose will be dead; and what will it matter to me? 
I dare say I shall be a musical box with a broken spring, lying 
in a dust of dried myrtle and musty laurels!” 

Lady Dolly danced, floated, bobbed like a cork, drifted languid- 
ly with her arms above her head, dived and disappeared with 
only the rosy soles of her feet visible — did everything that a pretty 
woman and a good swimmer can do in shallow, smooth water, 
with no breeze to mar her comfort. But she was in a very bad 
temper all the time. 

Jura did not improve it, when she came out of the water, by 
asking her, again, to let her daughter go with them in the 
“ Ephemeris.” 

“ Au grand jamais!” said Lady Dolly, quite furiously. “ After 
such an exhibition of herself with a singer! Are you mad?” 

She went home furious, changed her wet stripes for a yachting 
dress in sullen silence, refused to see the German governess, or 
to allow Yere’s door to be opened till she should return in the 
evening, and went down to the yacht in a state of great irrita- 
tion, with a charming costume, all white serge and navy blua 
satin, with anchor buttons in silver, and a Norwegian belt hung 
with everything that the mind of man could imagine as going 
on to a girdle. 

The “Ephemeris” was one of the best yachts on the high seas; 
had a good cook, wonderful wines, a piano, a library, a cabin of 
rosewood and azure, and deck -hammocks of silk. Nevertheless 
everything seemed to go wrong on board of her that day — at 
least to Lady Dolly. They got becalmed, and stuck stupidly 
still, while the steam yachts were tearing ahead in a cruel and 
jeering manner; then the sea got rough all in a moment; the 
lobster salad disagreed with her, or something did; a spiteful 
stiff wind rose; and the grand duchess borrowed her cigarette- 
case and never returned it, and, of course, could not be asked for 
it. and it contained the only verbena-scented papelitos that there 
were on board. Then Jura was too attentive to the comfort of 
another woman, or she fancied, at any rate, that he was; and 
none of her especial pets were there, so she could not make re- 
prisals as she wished; and Correze had obstinately and obdu- 
rately refused to come at all. Not that she cared a straw about 
Correze, but she hated being refused. 

“ What a wax you’re in, Dolly!” said Lord Jura, bringing her 
some iced drinks and peaches. 

“ When I’ve had three mad people sent to me!” she cried, in a 
rage. “And Til be obliged to you, Jack, not to use slang 
to me.” 

Lord Jura whistled and went aft. 

“What a boor he grows!” thought Lady Dolly. And the 
“ Ephemeris” was pitching, and she hated pitching, and the little 
5>uc de Dinant was not on board because Jack wouldn’t have 


MOTHS. 


him; and she feH ill-used, furious, wretched, and hated the cook 
for making the lobster salad, and Verefor having been born. 

“ A boy wouldn’t have been half so bad,” she thought. “He’d 
have been always away, and they’d have put him in the army. 
But a girl! It’s all very easy to say marry her, but she hasn’t any 
money, and the Mull people won’t give her any, and my own 
people can’t, and as for Mr. Vanderdecken, one might as well try 
to get blood out of a flint; and they may say what they like, but 
all men want money when they marry nowadays, even when 
they’ve got heaps more than they know what to do with them- 
selves. What a horrid woman the grand duchess is! She’s drunk 
already, and it isn’t three o’clock!” 

“She’s going splendidly now,” said Jura, meaning the “ Ephem- 
eris,” that plunged and reared as if she were a mare instead ot 
a schooner; and the fresh sou’easter that had risen sent her 
further and further westward toward the haze of distant seas. 

“I believe we’re going straight to America! What beastly 
idiocy is yachting!” said Lady Dolly, savagely, as the wind tor© 
at her tiny multitudinous curls. 


CHAPTER IV. 

Meanwhile, Yere, in religious obedience, had gone to the 
little chamber that was called, by courtesy at the Chalet Ludoff a 
study, and, submitting to be locked in, remained happy in the 
morning’s golden dream of sunshine, of song, of the sea, of the 
summer. She had found her lost Northumbrian safe, but in 
agonies of terror and self-reproach, and the amiable German for 
once was seriously angry. But Vere was not to be ruffled or 
troubled; she smiled at all reproof, scarcely hearing it, and put 
her cabbage-rose and her sprigs of lavender in water. Then she 
fell fast asleep on a couch, from fatigue and the warmth of the 
Norman sun, and dreamed of the blue gentian of the Alps that 
she had never seen, and Qf the music of the voice of Correze. 

When she awoke, some hours had passed; the clock told her it 
was two. The rickety white- and-gold door would have given 
way at a push, but to her it was inviolate. She had been reared 
to give obedience in the spirit as well as the letter. 

She thought no one had ever had so beautiful a day as this 
morning of hers. She would have believed it a dream, only there 
were her rose and the homely heads of the lavender. 

The German brought Euclid and Sophocles into the prison- 
chamber, but Yere put them gently away. 

“I cannot study to-day,” she said. It was the first time in 
her life that she had ever said so. 

The Fraulein went away weeping, and believing that the 
heavens would fall. Yere, with her hands clasped behind 
her head, leaned back and watched the white clouds come and gar 
above the sea, and fancied the air was still full of that marvel 
ous and matchless voice which had told her at last all that music 
could be. 

“ He is the angel Raphael!” she said to herself. It seemed to . 
her that he could not be mere mortal man. 


40 


MOTHS. 


Her couch was close to the glass doors of the room, and they 
opened into one of the scroll-work balconies which embroidered 
the fantastic front of the Chalet Ludoff. The room was nomin- 
ally up-stairs, but literally it was scarcely eight feet above the 
ground without. 

It was in the full hot sunshine of early afternoon when the 
voice she dreamed of, said softly: 

“ Mademoiselle Herbert!” 

Yere roused herself with a start, and saw the arm of Correze 
leaning on the balcony and his eyes looking at her; he was stand- 
ing on the stone perron below. 

“I came to bid you farewell,” he said, softly. “I go to Ger- 
many to-night. You are a captive, I know, so I dared to speak 
to you thus.” 

“ You go away!” 

To the girl it seemed as if darkness fell over the sea and shore. 

“ Ah, we princes of art are but slaves of the ring after all. Yes, 
my engagements have been made many months ago: to Baden, 
to Vienna, to Moscow, to Petersburg; then Paris and London 
once more. It may be long ere we meet, if ever we do, and I 
dare to call myself your friend, though you never saw my face 
until this morning.” 

“You have been so good to me,” murmured Yere, and then 
stopped, not knowing what ailed her in the sudden sense of sor- 
row, loss, and pain which came over her as she listened. 

“Oh, altroT laughed Correze, lifting himself a little higher, 
and leaning more easily on the iron of the balcony. ‘ ‘ I found 
yon a pair of wooden shoes, a cup of milk, and a cabbage-rose. 
Sorry things to offer to an enchanted princess who had missed 
her road! My dear, few men will not be willing to be as good to 
you as you will let them be. You are a child. You do not know 
your power. I wonder what teachers you will have? I wish you 
could go untaught; but there is no hope of that.” 

Vere was silent. She did not understand what he meant. 
She understood only that he was going far away — this brilliant 
and beautiful stranger who had come to her with the morning 
sun. 

“Mademoiselle Herbert,” continued Correze, “I shall sound 
like a preacher, and I am but a graceless singer; but try and keep 

f ourself ‘ '.spotted from the world.’ Those are holy words, and 
am net a holy speaker; but try and remember them. This 
world you will be launched in does no woman good. It is a 
world of moths. Half the moths are burning themselves in 
feverish frailty, the other half are corroding and consuming all 
that they touch. Do not become of either kind. You are made 
for something better than a moth. You will be tempted; you 
will be laughed at; you will be surrounded with the most insidi- 
ous sort of evil example, namely, that which does not look like 
evil one whit more than the belladonna berry looks like death. 
The women of your time are not, perhaps, the worst the world 
has seen, but they are certainly the most contemptible. They 
have dethroned grace; they have driven out honor; they have 
succeeded in making men ashamed of the aex of their mothers; 




MOTHS 


4* 

and they have set up nothing in the stead of all they have de- 
stroyed, except a feverish frenzy for amusement and an idiotic 
imitation of vice. You cannot understand now, but you will see 
it — too soon! They will try to make you look like them. Do 
not let them succeed. You have truth, innocence, and serenity; 
treasure . them. The women of your day will ridicule you, and 
tell you it is an old-fashioned triad, out of date like the Graces; 
but do not listen. It is a triad without which no woman is eruly 
beautiful, and without which no man’s love for her can be pure. 
I would fain say more to you, but I am afraid to tell you what 
you do not know; and woe to those by whom such knowledge 
first comes. Mon enfant , adieu.” 

He had laid a bouquet of stephanotis and orchids on the sill of 
the window at her feet, and had dropped out of sight before she 
had realized his farewell. 

“ When she 3trained her eyes to look for him, he had already 
disappeared. Tears blinded her sight, and fell on the rare blos- 
soms of his gift. 

“ I will try — I will try to be what he wishes,” she murmured 
to the, flowers. “ If only I knew better what he meant.” 

The^time soon came when she knew too well what he meant. 

Now she sat with the flowers in her lap, and wondered wearily, 
and sobbed silently, as if her heart would break. 

Correze was gone. 


CHAPTER Y. 

At sunset Lady Dolly returned, out of temper. They had been 
becalmed again for two hours, the sea all of a sudden becoming 
like oil, just to spite her, and they had played to while away the 
time, and the grand duchess had won a great deal of her money, 
besides smoking every one of her cigarettes and letting the case 
fall through the hatchway. 

“ I will never go out with that odious Russian again — never! 
The manners of a cantiniere and the claws of a croupier!” she 
said, in immeasurable disgust, of the august lady whom she had 
idolized in the morning; and she looked in at the little study, 
when she reached home, to allay her rage with making some one 
uncomfortable. 

“ Are you sufficiently ashamed of yourself, Vere?” she said, as 
she entered. 

Vere rose, rather uneasily, and with soft, sad, dewy eyes. 

“ Why should I be ashamed, mother?” she said, simply. 

“ Why? why? you ask why? after compromising yourself as you 
did this morning?” 

“ Compromise?” 

Vere had never heard the word. Women who were com- 
promised were things that had never been heard of at Bulmer. 

“Do not repeat what I say. It is the rudest thing you can 
do,” said her mother, sharply. “ Yes, compromised, hideously, 
compromised, — and with Correze, of all persons in the world! 
You must have been madl” 


43 MOTHS. 

Vere looked at her stephanotis and orchids, and her young face 
grew almost stern. 

“If you mean I did anything wrong, I did no wrong. It was 
all accident, and no one could have been so kind as — he — was.” 

The ear of Lady Dolly, quick at such signs, caught the little 
pause before the pronoun. 

“The world never believes in accidents,” she said, chillilv. 
“You had better understand that for the future. To be seen 
coming home in a boat early in the morning all alone with such 
a man as Correze would be enough to ruin any girl at the outset 
of her life, — to ruin her!” 

Vere’s eyes opened in bewildered surprise. She could not 
follow her mother’s thoughts at all, nor could she see where she 
had been in any error. 

“ Correze, of all men upon earth!” echoed her mother. “ Good 
heavens! do you know he is a singer?” 

“ Yes,” said Yere, softly, hearing all around her as she spoke 
the sweet liquid melody of that perfect voice which had called 
the skylark “a little brother.” 

“ A great singer, I grant, greatest, if you like, but still a singer, 
and a man with a hundred love affairs in every capital he enters! 
And to come home alone with such a man after hours spent alone 
with him. It was madness, Yere; and it was worse, it was for- 
ward, impudent, unmaidenly!” 

The giri’s pale face flushed; she lifted her head with a certain 
indignant pride. 

“You must say what you will, mother,” she said, quietly. 
“ But that is very untrue.” 

“Don’t dare to answer me,” said Lady Doily, “I tell you it 
was disgraceful, and goodness knows how ever I shall explain it 
away. Helene has been telling the story to everybody, and given 
it seven-leagued boots already. True! who cares what is true or 
what is not true; it is what a thing looks! I believe everybody 
gays you had come from Havre with Correze!” 

Yere stood silent and passive, her eyes on her stephanotis and 
orchids, 

“ Where did you get these extravagant flowers? Surely Jack 
never ” said Lady Dolly, suspiciously. 

“He brought them,” answered Yere. 

“ Correze? Whilst I was away?” 

“Yes. He spoke to me at the balcony.” 

“Well, my dear, you do Bulmer credit! No Spanish or Italian 
heroine out of his own operas could conduct herself more auda- 
ciously on the first day of her liberty. It is certainly what I al- 
ways thought would come of your grandmother’s mode of edu- 
cation. Well, go up-stairs in your bedroom and do not leave it 
until I send for you. No, you can’t take flowers up-stairs; they 
are very unwholesome — as unwholesome as the kindness of 
Correze.” 

Vere went, wistfully regarding her treasures; but she had kept 
the faded rose and the lavender in her hand unnoticed. 

“After all, I care most for these,” she thought, — the homely 
sea-born things that had been gathered after the songs. 


MOTHS. 43 

When the door had closed on her, Lady Dolly rang for her 

maitre-cThotel. 

“ Pay the Fraulein Schroder three months’ salary, and send 
her away by the first steamer; and pay the English servant what- 
ever she wants, and send her by the first steamer. Mind they 
are both gone when I wake. And I shall go to Deauville the day 
after to-morrow; probably I shall never come back here.” 

The official bowed, obedient. 

As she passed through her drawing-rooms, Lady Dolly took 
up the bouquet of Correze and went to her own chamber. 

“ Pick me out the best of those flowers,” she said to her maid, 

and stick them about all over me; here and there, you know.” 

She was going to dine with the Duchess de Sonnaz at Deau- 
ville. 

As she went to her carriage, the hapless German, quivering 
and sobbing, threw herself in her path. 

“Oh, miladil miladi !” she moaned. “It cannot be true? 
You send me not away thus from the child of my heart ? Ten 
years have I striven to write the will of God, and the learning 
that is better than gold, on that crystal-pure mind, and my life, 
and my brain, and my soul I do give ” 

“You should have done your duty,” said Lady Dolly, wrap- 
ping herself up and hastening on. “And you can’t complain, 
my good Schroder, you have got three mouths in excess of your 
wages.” And she drew her swan’s-down about her, and got into 
her carriage. 

“Now, on my soul, that was downright vulgar,” muttered 
John Jura. “ Hang it all, it was vulgar!” 

But he sighed as he said it to himself, for his experience had 
taught him that high-born ladies could be very vulgar when they 
were moved to be ill-natured. 

Correze was at the villa. 

She saw him a moment before dinner, and gave him tier pret- 
tiest smile. 

“ Oh, Correze ! what flowers ! I stole some of them, you see. 
You would turn my child’s head. I am glad you are going to 
Baden !” 

He laughed and said something graceful and novel, turned on 
the old mater pulchra, filia pulchrior. 

The dinner was not too long and was very gay. After it 
everybody wandered out into the gardens, which were hung with 
colored lamps and had musicians hidden in shrubberies, discours- 
ing sweet sounds to rival the nightingales. The light was sub- 
dued, the air delicious, the sea glimmered phosphorescent and 
starlit at the end of dusky alleys and rose-lmng walks. Lady 
Dolly wandered about with Sergius Louroff and others, and felt 
quite romantic, whilst John Jura yawned and sulked; she never 
allowed him to do anything else while she was amusing herself. 

Correze joined her and her Russians in a little path between 
walls of the quatre-saison rose and a carpet of velvety turf. The 
gtarssparkled through the rose-leaves, the sound of the sea stole 
up the silent little alley. Lady Dolly looked very pretty in a 
dress of dead white, with the red roses above her and their 


44 


MOTHS. 


dropped leaves at her feet. She was smoking— which was a 
pity; the cigarette did not agree with the roses. 

“ Madame,” cried Correze, as he sauntered on and disengaged 
her a little from the others, “ I have never seen anything so ex- 
quisite as your young daughter. Will you believe that I mean 
no compliment when I say so?” 

“My dear Correze! She is only a child!” 

“ She is not a child. What would you say, madame, if I told 
you that for full five minutes I had the madness to think to-day 
that I would pay my forfeit to Baden and Vienna for the sake of 
1 staying here?” 

“ Heaven forbid you should do any such thing! You would 
turn her head in a week!” 

“ What would you say, madame,” he continued, with a little 
laugh, disregarding her interruption, “ what would you say if I 
told you that I, Correze, had actually had the folly to fancy for 
five minutes that a vagabond nightingale might make his nest 
for good in one virgin heart? What would you say, miladi?” 

“ My dear Correze, if you were by any kind of possibility talk- 
ing seriously ” 

“ I am talking quite seriously — or let us suppose that I am. 
What would you say, miladi?” 

“I should "say, my dear Correze, that you are too entirely 
captivating to be allowed to say such things even in an idle 
jest, and that you would be always most perfectly charming in 
every capacity but one.” 

“ And that one is?” 

“Asa husband for anybody!” 

“ I suppose you are right,” said Correze, with a little sigh. 
“Will you let me light my cigarette at yours?” 

An hour later he was on his way to Brussels in the middle 
hours of the starry fragrant summer night. 


CHAPTER VI. 

Raphael de Correze had said no more than the truth of him- 
self that morning by the sweet-brier hedge on the edge of the 
Norman cliffs. 

All the papers and old documents that were needful to prove 
him the lineal descendant of the great Savoy family of Correze 
were safe in his bureau in Paris, but he spoke no more of them 
than he spoke of the many love-letters and imprudent avowals 
that were also locked away in caskets and cabinets in the only 
place that in any way could be called his home, his apartment in 
t he Avenue de l’Empereur. What was the use? All Marquis and 
Peer of France though he was by descent, he was none the less 
only a tenor singer, and in his heart of hearts he was too keenly 

E roud to drag his old descent into the notice of men merely that 
e might look like a frivolous boaster, an impudent teller of 
empty tales. Noblesse oblige, he had often said to himself, resist- 
ing temptation in his oft-tempted career, but no one ever heard 
him say aloud that paternoster of princes. His remembrance of 
bis race had been always with him like a talisman, but he wore 


MOTHS. 


45 


Ct like a talisman, secretly, and shy even of having his faith in it 

known. 

Correze, with all his negligence and gayety, and spoilt child 
of the world though he was, appraised very justly the worth of 
the world and his place in it. 

He knew very well that if a rain-storm on a windy night were 
to quench his voice in his throat forever, all his troops of lovers 
and friends would fall away from him, and his name drop down 
into darkness like any shooting-star on an August night. He 
never deceived himself. 

‘ ‘ I am only the world’s favorite plaything,” he would say to him- 
self. “ If I lost my voice I should be served like the nightingale in 
Hans Andersen’s story. Oh, I do not blame the world; things 
are always so; only it is well to remember it. It serves, like 
Yorick’s skull, or Philip’s slave, to remind one that one is mortal.” 

The remembrance gave him force, but it also gave him a tinge 
of bitterness, so far as any bitterness is ever possible to a sunny, 
generous, and careless nature, and it made him before everything 
an artist. 

When he was very insolent to grand people, — which he often 
was in the caprice of celebrity — those people said to one another, 
“ Oh, that is because he thinks himself Marquis de Correze.” 
But they were wrong. It was because he knew himself a great 
artist. 

The scorn of genius is the most boundless and the most arro- 
gant of all scorn, and he had it in him very strongly. The world 
said ho was extravagantly vain, the world was wrong; yet if he 
had been, it would have been excusable, Women have thrown 
themselves into his arms from his earliest youth for the sake of 
his beautiful face before his voice had been heard; and when his 
voice had captured Europe there was scarcely any folly, any 
madness, any delirium, any shame, that women had not been 
ready to rush into for his sake, or for the mere sight of him and 
the mere echo of his song. 

There is no fame on earth so intoxicating, so universal, so ener- 
vating, as the fame of a great singer; as it is the most uncertain 
and unstable of all, the most evanescent and most fugitive, so 
by compensation is it the most delightful and the most gorgeous 
—rouses the multitude to a height of rapture as no other art can 
do, and makes the dull and vapid crowds of modern life hang 
breathless on one voice, as in Greece, under the violet skies, men 
hearkened to the voice of Pindar or of Sappho. 

The world has grown apathetic and purblind. Critics still rave 
and quarrel before a canvas, but the nations do not care; quarries 
of marble are hewn into various shapes, and the throngs gape 
before them and are indifferent; writers are so many that their 
writings blend in the public mind in a confused phantasmagoria 
where the colors have run into one another and the lines are all 
waved and indistinct; the singer alone still keeps the old magic 
power, “ the beauty that was Athens’ and the glory that was 
Rome’s,” still holds the divine caducous, still sways the vast 
thronged auditorium, till the myraids hold their breath like little 
children in delight and awe. The great singer alone has the old 


MOTES. 


M 

'magic sway of fame; and if he close his lips “the gayety of 
nations is eclipsed,” and the world seems empty and silent like 
a wood in which the birds are all dead. . 

It is a supreme power, and may well intoxicate a man. 

Correze had been as little delirious as any who have drunk of 
the philtre of a universal fame, although at times it had been too 
strong for him, and had made him audacious, capricious, incon- 
stant, and guilty of some follies; but his life was pure from any 
dark reproach. 

“ Soyez gentilhomme ,” his father had said to him in the little 
hut on the Pennine Alps, with the snow -fields severing them 
from all other life than their own, and had said it never thinking 
that this boy would be more than at best a village priest or 
teacher; the bidding had sunk into the mind of the child, and the 
man had not forgotten it now that Europe was at his feet, 
and its princes but servants who had to wait his time, and he 
liked to make them wait. “Perhaps -hat is not gentilhomme” 
he would say in reproach to himself, but it diverted him, and he 
did i every often — most often when he thought angrily that he was 
but like Hans Andersen’s nightingale, the jeweled one that was 
thrown aside and despised when once its spring was snapped 
and broken. If he were only that, he was now at the moment 
when emperor and court thought nothing in heaven or on earth 
worth hearing bid the jeweled nightingale, and “ the crowds in 
the streets hummed his song.” Yet as the night train bore him 
through the level meadows, and corn-fields glistening in the 
moonlight, and the hush of a sleeping world, his eyes were dim 
and his heart was heavy, and on the soft cushions of the traveling- 
bed they had given him he could not find rest. 

“ The moths will corrupt her,” he thought, sadly and wist- 
fully. “The moths will eat all that fine delicate feeling away, 
little by little; the moths of the world will eat the unselfishness 
first, and then the innocence, and then the honesty, and then 
the decency; no one will see them eating, no one will see the 
havoc being wrought; but little by little the fine fabric will go, 
and in its place will be dust. Ah, the pity of it! The pity of it! 
The webs come out of the great weaver’s loom lovely enough, 
but the moths of the world eat them all. One weeps for the 
death of children, but perhaps the change of them into callous 
men and worldly women is a sadder thing to see after all.” 

His heart was heavy. 

Was it love? No; he fancied not; it could not be. Love with 
him — an Almaviva as much off the stage as on it — had been a 
charming, tumultuous, victorious thing; a concession rather to 
the weakness of the women who sought him than to his own; 
the chief, indeed, but only one among many other distractions 
and triumphs. 

It was not love that made his heart go out to that fair-haired 
child with the thoughtful questioning eyes. It was rather pity, 
tenderness, reverence for innocence, rage against the world 
soon which would so soon change her, poor little moth, dreaming 
of flying up to heaven’s light, and born to sink into earth’s 
Commonest fires! 


MOTHS. 


47 


Correze did not esteem women highly. They had caressed 
him into satiety, and wooed him till his gratitude was more than 
half contempt; but in his innermost heart, where his old faiths 
dwelt unseen by even his best friends, there was the fancy of 
what a woman should be, might be, unspotted by the world, and 
innocent in thought as well as deed. 

Such a woman had seemed to him to be in the girl whom he 
had found by the sea, as the grand glory of the full white rose 
lies folded in the blush-rose bud. 

It was too absurd! 

Her mother had been right, quite right. 

The little, frivolous, artificial woman, with her perruque and 
her papelitos, had said all that society would say. She had been 
wise, and he, in a passing moment of sentiment, a fool. He had 
scarcely really considered the full meaning of his own words, 
and where they would have led him had they been taken seri- 
ously. 

He thought now of all the letters lying in those cabinets and 
caskets at Paris. 

“What a burnt-sacrifice of note-paper I should have had to 
make!” he said to himself, and smoked a little, and tried to ridi- 
cule himself. 

Was he, Correze, the lover of great rulers of society, the hero 
of a hundred and a thousand intrigues and romances, in love 
with a mere child, because she bad serious eyes and no shoes and 
stockings? bewitched by a young girl who had sat half an hour 
beside him by a sweet-brier hedge on a cliff by the sea? It was 
too absurd. 

From Baden there had come an impatient summons from a 
dark-haired duchess of the Second Empire, who fancied that she 
reigned over his life because he reigned over hers like a fatality, 
an imperious and proud woman whom the lamps in the Avenue 
de 1’Empereur had shone on as she stole on foot, muffled and 
veiled, to hide her burning face on his breast; he thought of her 
where she was waiting for him, and a little shudder of disgust 
went over him. 

He threw open the window of his bed-carriage, and leaned his 
head out, to meet the midnight wind. 

The train was passing a little village, a few cottages, a pond, a 
mill, a group of willows silvery in the starlight. From the little 
green gardens there- came a scent of sweet-brier and hedge 
roses. 

“Shall I smell that smell all my life?” he thought, impa- 
tiently. 

CHAPTER Vn. 

Lady Dolly had a very dear friend. Of course she had five 
hundred dear friends, but this one she was really fond of; that is 
to say, she never said anything bad of her, and only laughed at 
her good-naturedly when she had left a room; and this abstinence 
is as strong a mark of sinceritv nowadays, as dying for another 


43 MOTHS . 

used to be in the old days of strong feelings and the foolish ex* 
pression of them. 

This friend was her dear Adine, otherwise Lady Stoat of 
Stitchley, who had just won the honor of the past year’s season 
by marrying her daughter (a beauty) to a young marquis, who, 
with the small exceptions of being a drunkard, a fool, and a 
brute, was everything that a mother’s soul could desire; and ail 
the mother’s souls in the great world had accordingly burned for 
him passionately, and Lady Stoat had won him. 

Lady Stoat was as much revered as a maternal, model of ex- 
cellence in her time as the mother of the Gracchi in hers. She 
was a gentle-looking woman, with a very soft voice, which she 
never raised under any provocation. She had a will of steel, but 
she made it look like a blossoming and pliant reed; she was very 
Religious and strongly ritualistic. 

When Lady Dolly awoke the next morning, with the vague 
Remembrance of something very unpleasant having happened to 
her, it was to this friend that she fled for advice as soon as she 
was dressed, having for that purpose to drive over to Deauville, 
'where Lady Stoat, who thought Trouville vulgar, had a charming 
little place, castellated, coquettish, Gothic, Chinese, Moorish, 
all kinds of things in a pretty pell-mell of bonbon-box architect- 
ure, set in a frame of green turf and laurel hedges, and round- 
headed acacias, and with blazing geranium-beds underneath its 
gilded balconies and marqueterie doors. Lady Dolly had herself 
driven over in the Due de Dinant’s panier with his four ponies, 
and while he went to find out some friends and arrange the 
coming races, she took her own road to the Maison Perle. 

“Adine always knows,” she thought. She was really fond of 
her Adine, who was many years older than herself. But for her 
Adine, certain little bits of nonsense and imprudence in Ladj r 
Dolly’s feverish little life might have made people talk, and given 
trouble to Mr. Yanderdecken, absorbed as he might be in Java, 
Japan, or Jupiter. 

Lady Stoat of Stitch ley was one of those invaluable characters 
who love to do good for good’s own sake, and to set things 
straight for the mere pleasure of being occupied. As some per* 
sons of an old-maidish or old-bachelor turn of mind, will go fat 
out of their way to smooihe a crease or remove a crumb, though 
neither be marring their own property, so would Lady Stoat go 
far out of her way to prevent a scandal, reconcile two enemies, or 
clear a tangled path. It was her way of amusing herself. She 
had a genius for management. She wa3 a clever tactician, and 
her tactics interested her and employed her time agreeably. If 
any one in her world wanted a marriage arranged, a folly pre- 
vented, a. disgrace concealed, or a refractory child brought to 
reason, Lady Stoat of Stitchley would do it in the very best 
possible manner. 

“ It is only my duty,” she would say, in her hushed melodi- 
ous monotonous voice, and nearly everybody thought Lady Stoat 
the modern substitute of a saint on earth. 

To this saint now went Lady Dolly with her troubles and he? 

tale. 


MOTHS. 


*9 

“ What can I do with her, dearest?’* she cried, plaintively, in 
the pretty little morning room, whose windows looked over the 
geranium-beds to the gray sea. 

Lady Stoat was doing crewel-work; a pale, slight, gracefully- 
made woman, with small, straight features, and the very sweet- 
est and saddest of smiles. 

“ What young men are there?” said Lady Stoat, now in re- 
sponse, still intent on her crewel- work. “ I have not thought 
about them at all since the happiness of my own treasure was 
secured. By the by, I heard from Gwen this morning; she tells 
me she has hopes, — Our Mother in Heaven has heard my prayers. 
Imagine, love, my becoming a grandmamma! It was what I 
long so for! — just a silly old grandmamma, spoiling all her pets! 
I feel I was born to be a grandmamma!” 

“I am so glad! How very charming!” murmured Lady 
Holly, vaguely and quite indifferent. “I am so terribly afraid 
Vere won’t please, and lam so afraid of this affair with Correze.” 

“ What affair? with whom?” asked Lady Stoat of Stichley, 
waking from her dreams of being grandmamma. 

Whereon she told it, making it look very odd and very bad, in- 
deed, in the unconscious exaggeration which accompanied Lady 
Dolly’s talk as inevitably as a great track of foam precedes and 
follows the track of a steamer. 

Lady Stoat was rather amused than shocked. 

“ It is very like Correze, and he is the most dangerous man in 
the world; everybody is in love with him; Gwendolen was, but 
all that is nothing, it is not as if he were one of us.” 

“ He is one of us! He goes everywhere!” 

“ Oh, goes! — well, that is because people like to ask him; so- 
ciety is a pig-stye; but all that does not alter his being a singer.” 

“ He is a marquis, you know, they say!” 

“ All singers are marquises, if you like" to believe them. My 
dear Dolly, you cannot be serious in being afraid of Correze? If 
you are, all the more reason to marry her at once.” 

“ She is not the style that anybody likes at all nowadays,” re- 
plied Lady Dolly, in a sort of despair. “ She is not the style of 
the day at all, you know. She has great natural distinction, but 
I don’t think people care for that, and they like chien. She will 
always look like a gentlewoman, and they like us best when we 
don’t. I have a conviction that men will be afraid of her. Ia 
there anything more fatal? Vera will never look like a belle petite, 
in a tea-gown, and smoke, never! She has gone a hundred years 
back, being brought up by that horrid old woman. You could 
fancy her going to be guillotined in old lace, like Marie Antoin- 
ette. What can I do?” 

“ Keep her with you six months, dear,” said the friend, who 
was a woman of some humor. “ And I don’t think poor Marie 
Antoinette had any lace left to wear.” 

“ Of course I must keep her with me,” said Lady Dolly, with 
exasperation, who was not a woman of humor, and who did not 
see the jest. 

Lady Stoat reflected a moment. She liked arranging things* 
whether they closely concerned her or not. 


'TO 1 MOTHS . 

“There is the Cliambree’s son?” she said, hesitatingly. 

“ I know! But they will want such a dower, and "V ere has 
nothing, — nothing J” 

“ But if she be a beauty?” 

“She will be beautiful; she won’t be a beauty; not in the way 
men like now. She will always look cold.” 

“ Do they dislike that? Not in their wives, I think; my Gwen 
looks very cold,” said her friend, then added, with innocent* 
impassiveness, “ You might marry her to Jura.” 

Lady Dolly laughed and colored. 

“Poor Jack! He hates the very idea of marriage. I don’t 
think he will ever ” 

“ They all hate it,” said Lady Stoat, tranquilly. “ But they do 
it" when they are men of position ; Jura will do it like the rest. 
What do you think of Serge Zouroff?” 

Lady Dolly this time did not laugh; she turned white under- 
neath Piver’s bloom ; her pretty sparkling eyes glanced uneasily. 

“ Zouroff!” she repeated, vaguely, “Zouroff!” 

“ I think I should try,” answered Lady Stoat, calmly. “ Yes, 
I do think I should tiy. By the way, take her to Felicite; you 
are going there, are you not? It would, be a great thing for you, 
dear, to marry her this year; you would find it such a bore in the 
season; don’t I know what it is? And for you, so young as you 
are, to go to balls with a demoiselle a marier! — my poor little 
puss, you would die of it.” 

“ I am sure I shall as it is!” said Lady Dolly; and her nerves 
gave way, and she cried. 

“ Make Zouroff marry her, said Lady Stoat, soothingly, as if 
she were pouring out drops of chloral for a fretful child. 

“ Make Zouroff!” echoed Lady Dolly, with a certain intonation 
that led Lady Stoat to look at her quickly. 

“Has she done naughty things that she has not told me?” 
thought her confidante. “No, I do not fancy so. Poor little 
pussy! she is too silly not to be transparent.” 

Aloud, she said merely: 

“ Zouroff is middled-aged now; Nadine would be glad to see 
him take any one; she would not oppose it. He must marry some 
time, and I don’t know anybody else so good as he.” 

“ Good!” ejaculated Lady Dolly, faintly. She was still startled 
and agitated, and strove to hide that she was so. “ Vere would 
never,” she murmured; “ you don’t know her; she is the most 
dreadful child ■” 

“You must bring her to me,” said Lady Stoat. 

She was very successful with girls. She never scolded them; 
she never ridiculed them; she only influenced them in a gentle, 
imperceptible, sure way, that little by little made Ihem feel that 
love and honor were silly things, and that all that really mat- 
tered was to have rank, and to be rich, and to be envied by 
others. 

Lady Stoat never said this, never said, indeed, anything ap- 
proaching it, but all girls that she took any pains with learned it 
by heart, nevertheless, as the gospel of their generation. 


MOTHS. m 

It was her own religion; she only taught what she honestly be- 
Sieved. 

A little comforted, Lady Dolly left her calming presence 
met her little duke and breakfasted with him merrily at a hotel, 
and drove back to her own chalet to dress for a dinner at the 
Maison Normande. 

The doors of Felicite would not open until the first -day of Sep- 
tember, and there were still some dozen days of August yet to 
pass, and on those days Vere was to be seen occasionally by her 
mother’s side on the beach, and in the villas, and at the races at 
Deauville, and was clad by the clever directions of Adrienne in 
charming, youthful dresses, as simple as they were elegant. She 
was taken to the Casino, where the high-born young girls of her 
own age read, or worked, or played with the petits chevaux; she 
was made to walk up and down the planks, where her innocence 
brushed the shoulders of Casse-une-croute, the last new villainy 
out in woman, and her fair cheeks felt the same sunbeams and 
breeze that fell on all the faded peches a quinze sous. She was 
taken to the bal des bebes, and felt a pang that was older than 
her years at seeing those little frizzed and furbelowed flirts of 
five, and those vain, little, simpering dandies of three. 

“Oh, the poor, poor little children!” she thought; “they wi| 
never know what it is to be young!” 

She, even in monastic old Bulmer, had been left a free, open- 
air, natural, honest child’s life. Her own heart here was oppress- 
ed and lonely. She missed her faithful old friends; she took no 
pleasure in the romp and racket that was round her; she under- 
stood very little of all that- she saw, but the mere sight of it hurt 
her. Society, to this untutored child of the Northumbrian moors, 
looked so grotesque and so vulgar. This Trouville mob of fine 
ladies and adventuresses, princes and blacklegs, ministers and 
dentists, reigning sovereigns and queens of the theaters, seemed 
to her a saturnalia of Folly, and its laugh hurt her more than a 
blow would have done. 

Her mother took her out but little, and the less that she went 
the less troubled she was? That great mass of vari-colored, noisy 
life, so pretty as a spectacle, but so deplorable as humanity, dis* 
mayed and offended her. She heard that these ladies of Deau- 
ville, with their painted brows, their high voices, their shrill 
laughter, their rickety heels, were some of the greatest ladies of 
Europe; but to the proud temper and the delicate taste of the 
child they seemed loathsome. 

“You are utterly unsympathetic!” said her mother, disgusted, 
“ frightfully unsympathetic! You are guindee, positive, puritan! 
You have not a grain of adaptability. I read, the other day, 
somewhere that Madame Recamier, who was always called the 
greatest beauty of our great-grandmothers’ times, was really 
nothing at all to look at— quite ordinary; but she did smile so in 
everybody’s face, and listen so to all the bores, that the world 
pronounced her a second Helen. As for you — handsome though 
you are, and you really are quite beautiful, they say — you look so 
scornful of everything and so indignant at any little nonsense, thai 


52 


MOTHS. 


I should not wonder in the least if you never even got called a 
beauty at all.” 

Lady Dolly paused to see the effect of the most terrible predic- 
tion that it was in female power to utter. Vere was quite 
unmoved; she scarcely heard. 

She was thinking of that voice, clear as the ring of gold, which 
had said to her: 

“Keep yourself unspotted from the world.” 

“ If the world is nothing better than this, it must be very easy 
to resist it,” she thought, in her ignorance. 

She did not know that from these swamps of flattery, intrigue, 
envy, rivalry and emulation, there rises a miasm which scarcely 
the healthiest lungs can withstand. She did not know that 
though many may be indifferent to the tempting of men, few 
indeed are impenetrable to the sneer and the smile of women; 
that to live your own life in the midst of the world is a harder 
thing than it was of old to withdraw to the Thebaid; that to risk 
“ looking strange ” requires a courage perhaps cooler and higher 
than the soldier’s or the saint’s; and that to stand away from the 
contact and tne custom of your “ set ” is a harder and a sterner 
work than it was of old to go into the sanctuary of La Trappe oi 
Port Royal. 

Autres temps, autres mceurs; but we too have our martyrs. 

Felicite was a seaside chateau of the Princes Zouroff, which 
they had bought from an old decayed French family and had 
transformed into a veritable castle of fairy-land. They came to 
it for about three months in as many years; but for beauty and 
loveliness it had no equal, even among the many summer holiday- 
houses scattered up and down the green coast, from Etretat to 
the Rochers de Calvados. This year it was full of people: the 
Princess Nadine Nelaguine was keeping open house there for 
her brother Sergius Zouroff. White-sailed yachts anchored in its 
bay; chasseurs in green and gold beat its woods; riding-parties 
and driving-parties made its avenues bright with color and 
movement; groups like Watteau pictures wandered in its gar- 
dens; there was a little troupe of actors from Paris for its theater; 
life went like a song; and Sergius Zouroff would have infinitely 
preferred to be alone with some handsome Tschigan women and 
many flagons of brandy. 

Madame Nelaguine was a little woman, who wo. a wig that 
had little pretence about it, and smoked all day long, and read 
scdetes with zest, and often talked them; yet Madame Nelaguine 
could be a power in politics when she chose, could cover herself 
with diamonds and old laces, and put such dignity into her tiny 
person that she once crushed into utter nervousness a new-made 
empress, whom she considered varnish. She was wonderfully 
clever, wonderfully learned; she was cunning, and she could be 
cruel, yet she had in her own way a kind heart; she was a great 
musician and a great mathematician; she had been an ambassa- 
dress, and had distinguished herself at great courts. She had 
had many intrigues of all kinds, but had never been compromised 
by any one of them. She was considerably older than her 
brother, and seldom approved of him. 


MOTHS, 


58 


„ ^ P e ut se debaucher, metis on doit se debaucher avec de 

I esprit, she would say; and the modern ways of vice seemed to 
her void of w it! “You are not even amused,” she would add. 

It you were amused, one could comprehend; but you are not. 
You spend your fortunes on creatures that you do not even like; 
you spend your nights in gambling that does not even excite 
you commit vulgarities that do not even divert you, only 
because everybody else does the same; you caricature monstrous 
vices so that you make even those no longer terrible, but ridicu- 
lous; and if you fight a duel you manage to make it look absurd, 
you take a surgeon with you! You have no passions. It is pas- 
sion that dignifies life, and you do not know anything about it, 
any of you; you know only infamy. And infamy is always so 
dull; it is never educated. Why do you copy Yitellius? Because 
you have not the wit to be either Horace or Caesar.” 

But Sergius Zouroff did not pay any heed to his cleverer 
sister. His Uraline mines, his vast plains of wheat, his forests and 
farms, his salt and his copper, and all that he owned, were treasures 
well-nigh inexhaustible, and although prodigal he was shrewd. 
He was not a man to be easily ruined, and, as long as his great 
wealth and his great position gave him a place that was almost 
royal in the society of Europe, he knew very well that he could 
copy Vitellius as he chose without drawing any chastisement on 
him. In a cold and heavy way he had talent, and with that 
talent he contrived to indulge all excesses in any vice that 
tempted him, yet remain without that social stigma that has 
marked before now princes wholly royal. 

“ Everywhere they are glad to see me, and everybody would 
marry me to-morrow,” he would say, with a shrug of his shoul- 
ders, when his sister rebuked him. 

To Felicite drove Lady Dolly, with Vere by her side. Yere had 
been given a white dress and a broad hat with white drooping 
feathers; she looked very pale; her mother supposed it was with 
excitement. 

She thought it the moment to offer a little maternal advice, 

II Now, dear, this will be quite going into the world for you. Do 
remember one or two things. Do try to look less grave; men 
hate a serious woman. And if you want to ask anything, don’t 
come tome, because I’m always busy; ask Adrienne or Lady 
Stoat. You have seen what a sweet dear motheily creature she 
is. She won’t mind telling you anything. There is a charming 
girl there, too, an American heiress, Fuschia Leach; a horrible 
name, but a lovely creature, and very clever. Watch her, and 
learn all you can from her. Tout Paris lost its head after her 
utterly this last winter. She’ll marry anybody she chooses. 
Pray don’t make me ashamed of you. Don’t be sensational, don’t 
be stupid, don’t be pedantic; and, for mercy’s sake don’t make 
any scenes. Never look surprised; never show a dislike to any- 
body; never seem shocked, if you feel so. Be civil all round, 
it’s the safest way in society; and pray don’t talk about mathe- 
matics and the Bible. I don’t know that there’s anything more I 
can tell you :'you must find it ail out for yourself. The world is lika 


54 MOTHS. 

whist: reading can’t teach it. Try not to blunder, that’s all; and 
do — watch Fuschia Leach.” 

“Is she so very beautiful and good?” 

“Good?” echoed Lady Dolly, desorientee and impatient. “I 
don’t know, I am sure. No, I shouldn’t think she was, by any 
means. She doesn’t go in for that. She is a wonderful social 
success, and men rave about her. That is what I meant. If you 
watch her, she will do you more good than I could if I had pa- 
tience to talk to you forever. You will see what the girl of youf 
time must be if she wants to please.” 

Vere’s beautiful mouth curled contemptuously. 

“ I do not want to please.” 

“ That is an insane remark,” said Lady Dolly, coldly. “ If you 
don’t, what do you live for?” 

Yere was silent. At dark old Bulmer she had been taught that 
there were many other things to live for; but she was afraid to 
say so, lest she should be “pedantic ” again. 

“ That is just the sort of silly thing I hate to hear a girl say, or 
a woman either. Americans never say such things,” said Lady 
Dolly, with vicacious scorn. “It’s just like your father, who 
always would go out in the rain when dinner was ready or read 
to somebody who had the scarlet fever, or give the best claret to 
a plow-boy with a sore throat. It is silly; it is unnatural. 
You should want to please. Why were we put in this world?” 

“ To make others happier,” Yere suggested, timidly, her eyes 
growing dim at her father’s name. 

“ Did it make me happier to have the scarlet fever brought 
home to me?” said Lady Dolly, irrelevantly and angrily. “ That 
is just like poor Yere’s sort of illogical reasonings; I remember 
them so well. You are exactly like him. I despair of you, I 
quite despair of you, unless Fuschia J .each can convert you.” 

“ Is she my age?” 

“ A year or two older, I think; she is perfect now; at five-and- 
twenty she will be hideous, but she will dress so w^ell it won’t 
matter. I know for a fact that she refused y our cousin Mull last 
month. She was very right; he is awfully poor. Still, she’d 
have been a duchess, and her father kept a bar: so it shows you 
what she can do.” 

“ What is a bar?” 

“Oh, pray don’t keep asking me questions like that. You 
make my head whirl. A bar is where they sell things to drink; 
and her brothers have a great pig-killing place ‘out west,’ 
wherever that is.” 

“ And she refused my cousin I” 

# “ Dear, yes ! This is the charming topsy-turvey world we 
live in: you will get used to it, my dear. They made a fuss 
because a tailor got to court last year. I am sure I don’t know 
why they did; if he’d been an American tailor nobody’d have said 
anything; they wouldn’t even have thought it odd. All the 
world over you meet them; they get in the swim somehow; 
they have such heaps of money, and their women know how to 
wear things. They always look like — what they shouldn’t look 
like—to be sure; but so most of us do, and men prefer it.” 


MOTHS. 55 

Vere understood not at all; but she did not venture again to 
ask for an explanation. 

Her mother yawned and brushed the flies away pettishly, and 
called to Lord Jura, who was riding beside their carriage, and 
had lagged a trifle behind in the narrow sandy road thajt ran 
level betwefen green hedges. The high metal roof and gilded 
vanes of Felicite were already shining above the low rounded 
masses of distant woods. It stood on the seacoast, a little way 
from Villers-sur-Mer. 

Vere did not understand why Lord Jura always went with 
them as naturally as the maids did and the dressing-boxes; 
but he was kind, if a little rough. She liked him. Only why 
did her mother call him Jack, and quarrel with him so, and yet 
want him always with her? 

Vere thought about it dimly, vaguely, perplexedly, especially 
when she saw the frank, blue eyes of Jura looking at herself, 
hard, and long, with a certain sadness and impatience in the 
gaze, as if he pitied her. 

The reception at Felicite seemed to Vere to be a whirl of 
bright hues, pretty faces, and amiable words. The Princess Na- 
dine Nelaguine was out on the terrace with her guests, and the 
princess kissed her with effusion, and told her she was like a 
Gainsborough picture. The princess herself was a fairy-like lit- 
tle woman, with a bright odd Calmuck face and two little 
brown eyes as bright as a marmoset’s. Vere was presented to 
so many people that she could not tell one from another, and 
she was glad to be left in her room while her mother, having 
got into a wonderful gold-embroidered Watteau sacque that 
she called a tea-gown, went to rejoin the other ladies among 
the roses and the perfumes and the late afternoon light. 

When Vere herself, three hours later, was dressed for dinner, 
and told to tap at her mother’s door, she did not feel nervous, 
because it was not in her nature to be easily made so, but she 
felt oppressed and yet curious. 

She was going into the world. 

And the counsels of Correze haunted her. 

Lady Dolly said sharply, “Come in!” and Vere, entering, 
beheld her mother for the first time in full war-paint and 
panoply. 

Lady Dolly looked sixteen herself. She was exquisitely 
painted; she had a gown cut en cceur which was as indecent 
as the heart of womai. could desire; jewels sparkled all over 
her; she was a triumph of art, and looked as exactly like Noi- 
sette of the Babil in her last new piece as even her own soul 
could aspire to do. 

‘'What are you staring at, child?” she asked of Vere, who had 
turned rather pale. “Don’t you think I look well? What is the 
matter?” 

“Nothing,” said Vere, who could not answer that it hurt her 
to see so much of her mother’s anatomy unveiled. 

“You look as if you saw a ghost,” said Lady Dolly, impa- 
tiently; “you have such a horrid way of staring. Come!” 

Vere went silently by her side down the wide staircase, lighted 


56 


idOTHS* 


by black marble negroes holding golden torches. After the 
silence, the stillness, the gloom, of her North nmbrian home, with 
the old servants moving slowly through the dim oak-paneled 
passages, the brilliance, the luxury, the glittering luster, the va 
et merit of Felicite seemed like a gorgeous spectacle. She would 
have liked to stand on that grand staircase, among the hothouse 
flowers, and look at it all as on a pageant. But her mother swept 
on into the drawing-rooms, and Yere heard a little murmur of 
admiration, which she did not dream was for herself. 

Lady Dolly in her way was an artist, and she had known the 
right thing to do when she had had Yere clad in white cachemire, 
with an old silver girdle of German work, and in the coils of 
her hair a single silver arrow. 

Yere was perfect in her stately, serious, yet childlike grace; 
and the women watching her enter felt a pang of envy. 

Sergius Zourolf, her host, advancing, murmured a “ divinement 
belle!” and Lady Stoat, watching from a distant sofa, thought to 
herself, “ What a lovely creature! really it is trying for poor little 
pussy.” 

Vere went into her first great dinner. She said little or nothing. 
She listened and wondered. Where she sat she could not see her 
mother nor any one she knew. The young French diplomatist 
who took her in tried to make himself agreeable to her, but she 
replied by monosyllables. He thought how stupid these lovely 
ingenues always were. He had not the open sesame of Correze 
to the young mute soul. 

Dinner over, Lady Stoat took possession of her in the charming, 
motherly affectionate way for which she was celebrated with 
young girls. But even Lady Stoat did not make much way with 
ner; Yere’s large sferious eyes were calmly watching everything. 

“ Will you show me which is Miss Leach?” she said, suddenly. 
Lady Stoat laughed and pointed discreetly with a fan. 

“ Who has told you about Fuschia Leach?” she said, amusedly. 
“ I will make you known to her presently; she may be of use to 
you.” 

Yere’s eyes, grave as a child’s awakened out of sleep into the 
glare of gas, fastened where her fan had pointed, and studied 
Miss Leach. She saw a very lovely person of transparent color- 
ing, of very small features, of very slight form, with a skin like 
delicate porcelain, an artistic tangle of artistically colored red- 
gold hair, a tiny impertinent nose, and a wonderful expression of 
mingled impudence, shrewdness, audacity, and resolution. This 
person had her feet on an ottoman, her hands behind her head, a 
rosebud in her mouth, and a male group around her. 

“ 1 shall not like her: I do not wish to know her,” said Vere, 
slowly. 

“My dear, do not say so,” said Lady Stoat. “ It will sound 
like jealousy, you know — one pretty girl of another ” 

“ Sbe is not a lady,” said Yere once more. 

“There you are right,” said Lady Stoat. “ Very few people 
are, my love, nowadays. But that is just the sort of thing you 
must not say. It will get quoted against you, and make you, 
make you — oh, such enemies, my love!” 


MOTHS. 


57 


“ Does it matter?” said Vere dreamily. She was wondering 
what Correze would have thought or did think of Miss Fuschia 
Leach. 

“ Does it matter to have enemies!” echoed Lady Stoat. “Oh, 
my sweet Vere! does it matter whether there is a pin sticking 
into one all day? A pin is a very little thing, no doubt, but it 
makes all the difference between comfort and discomfort. ” 

“ She is not a lady,” said Vere, again, with a passing frown on 
her pretty brows. 

“ Oh, my dear! if you wait for that!” Lady Stoat’s smile ex- 
pressed that if she did wait for that she would be more exacting 
than society. “As for not knowing her — nonsense! you must 
not object to anybody who is in the same house-party with your- 
self. 

“ She is extremely pretty,” added Lady Stoat. “ Those 
American girls so very often are; but they are all like the pou - 
pees de modiste. The very best of them are only very perfect 
likenesses of the young ladies that try the confections on for us 
at Pingat’s or Worth’s, and the dress has always a sort of look 
of being the first toilette they ever had. I don’t know why, for 
I hear they dress extremely well over there, and should be used 
to it, but it has that look, and they never get rid of it. No, my 
dear, no; you are right. Those new people are not gentlewomen, 
any more than men’s modern manners are like the Broad Stone 
of Honor. But do not say so. They will repeat it, and it will 
not sound kind, and unless you say what is kind, never say any- 
thing.” 

“ I would rather have any one I did not respect for an enemy 
than for a friend,” said Vere, with a child’s obstinacy. Lady 
Stoat smiled. 

“ Phrases, my love! — phrases! you have so much to learn, my 
child, as yet.” 

“ I will not learn of Miss Leach.” 

“Well, I do not admire her very much myself. But then I be- 
long to ah old school, you know. I am an old woman, and ha^e 
prejudices,” said Lady Stoat, sweetly. “ Miss Leach has the 
world at her foot, and it amuses her to kick it about like a tennis- 
ball, and show her ankles. I dare say you will do tho same, love, 
in another six months, only you will not show your ankles. All 
the difference will be there.” 

And then Lady Stoat, who though she called herself an old 
woman would have been extremely angry if anybody else had 
called her so, thought she had done enough for once for poor lit- 
tle pussy’s daughter, and turned to her own little mild flirtations 
with a bald and beribboned ambassador. 

Vere was left alone, to look and muse. 

Men glanced at her and said what a lo/eiy; child she was; but 
they kept aloof from her. They were afraid of an ingenue, and 
there was Fuschia Leach, whose laughter was ringing up to the 
chandeliers and out to the conservatories— Fuschia Leach, who 
had never been an ingenue, but a coquette at three years old, and 
a woman of the world at six. 

Jura alone came up and seated himself by Vere. 


MOTHS . 


“ How do you like it?” he said, wih an odd little smile. 

“ It is very pretty to look at,” answered Vere. 

“Ah, to be sure. As good as a play when you’re new to it, 
and awfully like a treadmill when you’re not. What do you 
think of Fuschia Leach?” 

Vere remembered Lady Stoat’s warning, and answered merely: 

“I think she is handsome.” 

“ I believe you; she threw over your cousin Mull as if he were 
dirty boots; so she does heaps of them. I don’t know what it is 
myself; I think it is her cheek. I always tell Dolly so — I beg 
your pardon — I mean your mother.” 

Vere had heard him say “ Dolly” very often, and did not know 
why he apologized. 

“ My mother admires her ?” she said, with a little interrogation, 
in her voice. Jura laughed. 

“ Or says she does. Women always say they admire a reign- 
ing beauty. It looks well, you know. They all swear Mrs. 
Dawtry is divine, and I’m sure in their hearts they think her 
rather ugly than otherwise.” 

“ Who is Mrs. Dawtry?” 

“ Don’t you know? Good heavens! But, of course, you don’t 
know anything of our world. It's a pity you ever should. Touch 
pitch — what is it the old saw says?” 

It was the regret of Correze, differently worded. 

“ But the world, as you call it, means men and women? It 
must be what they make it. They might make it good if they 
wished,” said Vere, with the seriousness that her mother de- 
tested. 

“ But they don’t wish, you see. That is it,” said Jura, with a 
sigh. “I don’t knowhow it is, when once you are in the swim 
you can’t alter tilings; you must just go along with the rest. 
One does heaps of things one hates only because others do them.” 

“ That is very contemptible,” said Vere, with the disdain that 
became her very well coming on her pretty, proud mouth. 

“I think we are contemptible,” said Jura, moodily; and to so 
frank a confession there was no reply or retort possible, Vere 
thought. 

“It is strange; he said much the same,” she murmured, half 
aloud. ‘ ‘ Only he said it like a poet, and you — speak in such an 
odd way.” 

“ How do I speak?” asked Jura, amused. 

“ Vou speak as if words cost too much, and you were obliged 
to use as few and choose as bald ones as you could find; English 
is such a beautiful language, if you read Milton or Jeremy Tay- 
lor, or Beaumont and Fletcher, or any of the old divines and 
dramatists ” 

She stopped, because Jura laughed. 

“ Divines and dramatists! My dear child, ‘we know nothing 
about such things; we have St. Albans and French adaptations; 
they’re our reading of divinity and the drama. Who was 4 he * 
that talked like a poet while I talk like a sweep?” 

“ I did not say you talked like a sweep; and I meant the Mar- 
quis de Correze.” 


MOTHS . 


59 


“Oh! your singer? Don’t call him a marquis. He is the 
prince of tenors, that’s all.” 

“ He is a French marquis,” said Vere, with a certain coldness. 
“They were a very great race. You can see all about it in the 
‘ Livre d’Or’ of Savoy; they were like the Counts Costa de Beau- 
regard, who lost every tning in the ’eighty-nine. You must have 
read M. de Beauregard's beautiful book •?” 

“ Never heard of it. Did the tenor tell you all that rubbish?” 

“Where is mamma, Lord Jura?” said Yere. “Iam tired of 
sitting here.” 

“That’s a facer,” thought Jura. “And, by Jove, very well 
given for such a baby. I beg your pardon,” he said, aloud. 
“ Correze shall be a prince of the blood, if you wish. Your 
mother is over there; but I doubt if she’ll thank you to goto her; 
she’s in the thick of it with them; look.” 

He meant that Lady Dolly was flirting very desperately, and 
enjoying herself very thoroughly, having nearly as many men 
about her as Miss Fuschia Leach. 

Yere looked, and her eyes clouded. 

“ Then I think I may go to bed- She will not miss me. Good- 
night.” 

“ No, she won’t miss you. Perhaps other people will.” 

“ There is no one I know, so how can they?” said Vere, inno- 
cently, and rose to go; but Sergius Zouroff, who had approached 
in the last moment, barred her passage with a smiling deference. 

“Your host will, Mademoiselle Herbert. Does my .poor house 
weary you, that you think of your own room at ten o’clock?” 

“I always go to bed at ten, monsieur,” said Vere. “It is 
nothing new for me.” 

“ Let me show you my flowers first,” at last said Prince Zou- 
roff. “ You know we Russians, born amidst snow and ice, have 
% passion for tropical houses; will you not come ?” 

He held out his arm as he spoke. Would it be rude to refuse ? 
Yere did not know. She was afraid it would, as he was her 
host. 

She laid her fingers hesitatingly on his offered arm, and was 
led through the rooms by Prince Zouroff. 

Fuschia Leach took her hands from, behind her head, and stared; 
Lady Dolly would have turned pale, if she had not been so well 
painted; Lady Stoat put her eye-glass up, and smiled. 

Prince Zouroff had a horror of unmarried women, and never 
had been known to pay any sort of attention to one, not even to 
his sister’s guest, Fuschia Leach the irresistible. 

Prince Zouroff was a tall, large man of seven-and-thirty, loosely 
built, and plain of feature. He had all the vices, and had them 
all in excess, but he was a very polished gentleman when he 
chose; and he was one of the richest men in Europe, and his 
family, of which he was the head, was very near the throne, in 
rank and influence; for twenty years, ever since he had left the 
imperial Corps de Pages, and shown himself in Paris, driving Ms 
team of black Orlofs, he had been the idolatry, the aspiration, 
imd the despair of all the mothers of maidens. 

Vere’fi passage through his drawing-rooms on his arm was a 


60 


MOTHS 


spectacle so astonishing that there was a general lull for a 
moment in the conversation of all his guests. It was a triumph, 
but Yere was wholly unconscious of it, which made her charm- 
ing in the eyes of the giver of it. 

“I think that’s a case,” said Miss Fuschia Leach to her ad 
mirers. She did not care herself. She did not want Zouroff, 
high and mighty and rich and of great fashion though he was; 
she meant to die an English duchess, and she had only thrown 
over the unhappy Mull because she had found out he was poor. 
“And what’s the use of being a duchess if you don’t make a 
splash ?” she said very sensibly to his mother, when they talked 
it over. She had flirted with Mull shamelessly, but so she did 
with scores of them; it was her way. She had brought the way 
from America. She had young men about her as naturally as a 
rat-catcher has ferrets and terriers; but she meant to take her 
time before choosing one of them for good and all. 

“ What a beautiful child she is,” thought Prince Zouroff, “and 
80 indifferent ! Can she possibly be naughty Dolly’s daughter ?” 

He was interested, and he, being skilled in such ways, easily 
learned the little there was to know about her, whilst he took 
her through:* his conservatories, and showed her Japan lilies, 
Chinese blossoms that changed color thrice a day, and orchids 
of all climes and colors. 

The conservatories were really rare, and pleased her; but Prince 
Zouroff did not. His eyes were bold and cold at once; they 
were red, too, and there was an odor of brandy on his breath that 
came to her through all the scent of the flowers. She did not 
like him. She was grave and silent. She answered what he 
asked, but she did not care to stay there, and looked round for a 
chance of escape. It charmed Zouroff, who was so used to see 
women throw themselves in his path that he found no pleasure 
in their pursuit. 

“ Decidedly she has been not at all with naughty Dolly!” he 
said to himself, and looked at her with so much undisguised ad- 
miration in his gaze, that Vere, looking up from the blossoms of 
a gloxinia, blushed to the eyes, and felt angry, she nould not 
very well have told why. 

“Your flowers are magnificent, and 1 thank you, monsieur; 
but I am tired, and I will say good-night,” she said, quickly, 
with a little haughtiness of accent and glance which pleased 
Zouroff more than anything had done for years. 

“I would not detain you unwillingly, mademoiselle, one mo- 
ment,” he said, with a low bow — a bow which had some real re- 
spect in it. “ Pardon me, this is your nearest way. I will say 
to miladi that you were tired. To-morrow, if there be anything 
you wish, only tell me, and it shall be yours.” 

He opened a door that led out of the last conservatory on to the 
foot of the great staircase; and Vere, not knowing whether she 
were not breaking all the rules of politeness and etiquette, bent 
her head to him and darted like a swallow up the stairs. 

Sergius Zouroff smiled, and strolled back alone through hi9 
drawing-rooms, and went up to Lady Dolly, and cast himself in* 
to a long, low chair by her side. 


MOTHS. 


*1 

u Mo (there, your lovely daughter did not appreciate my flow* 
m ± or myself. She told me to tell you she was tired, and has 
gone to her room. She is beautiful, very beautiful; but I can- 
not say that she is complimentary.” 

“She is only a child, said Lady Dolly, hurriedly; she was 
half relieved, half frightened. “ She is rude!” she added, re- 
gretfully. “ It is the way she has been brought up. You must 
forgive her, she is young.” 

“ Forgive her! Metis de bon cceur ! Anything feminine that 
runs away is only too delightful in these times,” said the prince, 
coolly. “ Do not change her. Do not tease her. Do not try to 
make her like yourself. I prefer her as she is.” 

Lady Dolly looked at him quickly. Was it possible that 
already 

Sergius Zourofl! was lying back in his chair with his eyes 
closed. He was laughing a little silently, in an unpleasant way 
that he had; he had spoken insolently, and Lady Dolly could 
not resent his insolence. 

“You are very kind, prince,” she said, as negligently as she 
could behind her fan. “ Very kind, to treat a child’s boutades as 
a girl’s charm. She has really seen nothing, you know, shut up 
in that old Northern house by the sea; and she is as eccentric as 
if she were eighty years old. Quite odd in her notions, quite!” 

“ Shall we play?” said Zouroff. 

They began to play, most of them, at a little roulette-table. 
Musicians were interpreting, divinely, themes of Beethoven and 
Schumann; the great glass halls and marble courts of the flowers 
were open with all their array of bloom; the green gardens and 
gay terraces were without in the brilliancy of moonlight; the 
sea was not a score of yards away, sparkling with phosphorus 
and star-rays; but they were indifferent to all these things. They 
began to play and heeded nothing else. The music sounded 
on deaf ears; the flowers breathed out odors on closed nostrils; 
the summer night spread its loveliness in vain; and the waters 
of salt wave and fresh fountain murmured on unheeded. Play 
held them. 

Sergius Zouroff lost plenty of money to Lady Dolly, who went 
to bed at two o’clock, worried and yet pleased, anxious and yet 
exultant. 

Vere’s room was placed next to hers. 

She looked in before passing on to her own. The girl lay sound 
asleep in the sweet dreamless sleep of her lingering childhood, 
her hair scattered like gold on the pillows, her limbs in the lovely 
grace of a serene and unconscious repose. 

Lady Dolly loosed at her as she slept, and an uneasy pang shot 
through her. 

“If he do mean that,” she thought, “I suppose it would be 
horrible. And how much too pretty and too innocent she would 
be for him — the beast!” 

Then she turned away, and went to her own chamber, and 
began the toilsome martyrdom of having her perruque unfast- 
ened and her night’s preparations for the morning’s enamel b©' 

gm. 


62 


MOTHS. 


To women like Lady Dolly life is a comedy, no doubt, played 
on great stages and to brilliant audiences, and very amusing 
and charming, and all that; but, alas! it has two dread pass- 
ages in each short twenty-four hours; they are, the bore of 
being “done up,” and the bore of being “undone.” 

It is a martyrdom, but they bear it heroically, knowing that 
without it they would be nowhere— would be yellow, pallid, 
wrinkled, even perhaps would be flirtationless, unenvied, 
shelved, and worse than dead! 

If Lady Dolly had said any prayers, she would have said, 
“Thank God for Piver!” 


CHAPTER VIII. 

It was a very pretty life at Felicdte. 

The riding-parties meeting under the old avenue of Spanish 
chestnuts and dispersing down the flowery lanes, the shooting- 
parties, which were not serious and engrossing as in England, 
but animated and picturesque in the deep old Norman woods, 
the stately dinner at nine o’clock every night, like a royal 
banquet, the music which was so worthy of more attentive 
hearers than it ever got, the theatre, pretty and pimpant as a 
coquette of the last century, the laughter, the brilliancy, the 
personal beauty of the women assembled there, all made the 
life at Felicite charming to the eye and ear. Yet amidst it all 
Vere felt very lonely, and the only friends she made were in 
the Irish horse that they gave her to ride, and in the big 
Russian hound that belonged to Prince Zouroff. 

The men thought her lovely, but they could not get on with 
her; the women disliked her as much as they adored, or pro- 
fessed to adore, Fuschia Leach. 

To Vere, who at Bulmer had been accustomed to see life held 
a serious and even solemn thing — who had been accustomed to 
the gravity of age and the melancholy of a seafaring poor and 
the northern tillers of a thankless soil — nothing seemed so won- 
derful as the perpetual gayety and levity around her. Was there 
any sorrow in the world? Was life only one long laugh? Was 
it right to forget the woes of others as utterly as they were 
forgotten here? She was always wondering, and there was no 
one to ask. 

“You are horribly in earnest, Vere,” said her mother, pet- 
tishly. “You should go and live with Mr. Gladstone.” 

But to Vere it seemed more horrible to be always laughing — 
and laughing at nothing. “When there are all the poor,” she 
thought, “and all the animals that suffer so.” She did not un- 
derstand that when these pretty women had sold china (and 
flowers at a fancy fair for a hospital, or subscribed to the Society 
for Prevention of Cruelty, they had really done all that they 
thought was required of them, and could dismiss all human and 
animal pain from their mind, and bring their riding-horses 
home saddle.-galled and spurtorn without any compunction. 

To the complete innocence and honesty of the girl’s nature the 
discovery of what s tore the world set on all things which ©he had 


Moms. 


08 

3Q3n taught to hold sacred left a sickening sense of solitude and 
depression behind it. Those who are little children now will 
have little left to learn when they reach womanhood. The little 
children that are about us at afternoon tea and at lawn tennis, 
that are petted by house-parties and romped with at pigeon- 
shooting, will have little left to discover. They are miniature 
women already; they know the meaning of many a dubious 
Lhrase; they know the relative value of social positions; they 
know much of the science of flirtation which society has substi- 
tuted for passion; they understand very thoroughly the shades of 
intimacy, the suggestions of a smile, the degrees of hot and cold 
that may be marked by a bow or emphasized with a “ good-day.” 
All the subtle science of society is learned by them instinctively 
and unconsciously, as they learn French and German from their 
maids. When they are women they will at least never have Eve’s 
excuse for sin; they will know everything that any tempter 
could tell them. Perhaps their knowledge may prove their safe- 
guard, perhaps not; perhaps without its bloom the fruit to men’s 
taste may seem prematurely withered. Another ten years wil> 
tell. At any rate, those we pet to-day will be spared the pang of 
disillusion when they shall be fairly out in a world that they 
already know with cynical t horoughness — baby LaJBruyeres, and 
Rochefoucaulds in frills and sashes. 

To Vere Herbert, on the contrary, reared as she had been upon 
grave studies and in country loneliness, the shock her faiths and 
her fancies received was very cruel. Sometimes she thought 
bitterly she would have minded nothing if only her mother haa 
been a thing she could have reverenced, a creature she could 
have gone to for support and sympathy. 

But her mother was the most frivolous of the whole sea of 
froth around her — of the whole frivolous womanhood about her 
the very emptiest bubble. 

Yere, who herself had been cast by nature in the mold to be 
a noble mother of children, had antique, sacred fancies that went 
with the name of mother. The mother of the Gracchi, the 
mother of Bonaparte, the mother of Garibaldi, the many nob!e 
and maternal figures of history and romance, were forever in 
her thoughts; the time-honored word embodied to her all sacri- 
fice, all nobility, all holiness. And her mother was this pretty 
foolish painted toy with false curls in a sunny circlet above her 
kohl- washed eyee, with her heart set on a cotillon, and her name 
in the mouths of the clubs; whose god was her tailor, and whose 
gospel was Zola; whose life was an opera-bouffe, and who, when 
she costumed for her part in it, took “la moindre excuse pour 
paraitre nue!” The thought of her mother, thus, hurt her, as, in 
revolutions, it hurts those who believe in Mary to see a Madonna 
spit upon by a mob. 

Lady Stoat saw this, and tried, in her fashion, to console her 
for it. 

“My dear, your mother is young still. She must divert her- 
self. It would be very hard on her not to be allowed. You musfc 
not think she is not fond of you because she still likes to waltz , n 

Yore’s eyes were very somber as she heard. 


MOTHS. 


U 

“I do not like to waltz. I never do.” 

“No, love? Well, temperaments differ. But surely you 
wouldn’t be so cruel as to condemn your mother only to have 
your inclinations, would you? Dolly was always full of fun. X 
think you have not fun enough in you, perhaps.” 

‘‘But my father is dead.” 

“ My dear, Queen Anne is dead! Henri Quatre est sur le Pont - 
Neuf. What other news will you tell us? I am not saying, dear, 
that you should tiling less of your father’s memory. It is toe 
sweet of you to feel so much, and very, very rare, alas! for now- 
adays our children are so forgetful, and we are so little to them. 
But still, you know, your mamma is young, and so pretty as she 
is, too, no one can expect her to shut herself up a recluse. Per- 
haps, had you been always with her, things would have been 
different; but she has always been so much admired and so pet- 
ted by every one that it was only natural — only natural that ” 

“ She should not want me,” said Yere, as Lady Stoat paused 
for a word that should adequately express Lady Dolly’s excuses 
whilst preserving Lady Dolly’s dignity before her daughter. 

“ Oh, my dear, I never meant that,” she said, hastily, whilst 
thinking, “ Quel enfant terrible!” 

The brilliant Fuschia was inclined to be very amiable and cor- 
dial to the young daughter of Lady Dorothy Yanderdecken, but 
Vere repelled her overtures with a chilling courtesy that made 
the bright American “feel foolish.” 

But Pick-me-up, as she was usually called in the great world, 
was not a person to be deterred by one slight, or by fifty. To 
never risk a rebuff is a golden rule for self-respect; but it is not 
the rule by which new people achieve success. 

Fuschia Leach was delighted with her social success, but she 
never deceived herself about it. 

In America, her people were r6 new people,”— that is to say, 
her father had made his pile selling cigars and drugs in a wild 
country, and her brothers were making bigger pile killing pigs, 
on a gigantic scale, out west. In New York, she and hers were 
deemed “shoddy,” — the verv shoddiest of shoddy — and were 
looked coldly on, and were left unvisited. But, boldly springing 
over to less sensitive Europe, they found themselves without 
effort received at courts and in embassies, and had become fash- 
ionable people almost as soon as they had had time to buy high- 
stepping horses and ask great tailor- to clothe them. It seemed 
very funny; it seemed quite unaccountable, and it bewildered 
them a little; but Fuschia Leach did not lose her head. 

“I surmise I’d best eat the curds while they’re sweet,” she 
said to herself, and she did eat them. She dressed, she danced, 
she made all her young men fetch and carry for her, she flirted, 
she caught up the ways and words and habits and graces of the 
great world, and adapted herself to her new sphere with versatile 
cleverness, but all the same she “ prospected” with a keen eye 
all the land that lay around her, and never deceived herself. 

“ I look cunning, and I’m spry, and I cheek him, and say out* 
rageous things, and he likes it, and so they all go mad on me 
after him,” she said to herself; meaning by her pronoun the great 


MOTHS . 


personage who had first made her the fashion. But she knew 
very well that whenever anything prettier, odder, or more “out- 
rageous ” than herself should appear she would lose her prestige 
in a day, and fall back into the ranks of the ten thousand Ameri- 
can girls who overrun Europe. 

“I like you,” she said to Vere unasked, one day, when she 
found her alone on the lawn. 

“You are very good,” said Vere, with the coldness of an em« 
press of sixty years old. 

“ I like you,” reiterated Miss Leach. “ I like you because you 
treat ’em like dirt under your feet. That’s our way; but these 
Europeans go after men as the squir’ls jump after cobs. You 
are the only one I have seen tliat don’t.” 

“ You are very amiable to praise me,” said Vere, coldly. The 
lovely Fuschia continued her reflections aloud. 

“We’re just as bad when the Englishmen go over to us; that’s 
a fact. But with our own men we ain’t; we just make shoe- 
blacks and scallyrags of them; they fetch and carry, and do as 
they’re told. What a sharp woman your mother is, and as 
lively as a katydid. Now on our side, you know, the old folks 
never get at play like that; they’ve given over.” 

“ My mother is young,” said Vere, more coldly still. 

Miss Leach tilted her chair on end. 

“ That’s just what’s so queer. They are young on into any age 
over here. Your mother’s over thirty, I suppose? Don’t you 
call that old? It’s Methuselah with us. But here your grand- 
mothers look as cunning as can be, and they’re as skittish as 
spring lambs; it’s the climate, I surmise.” 

Vere did not reply, and Miss Fuschia Leach, undaunted, con- 
tinued her meditations aloud. 

“You haven’t had many affairs. I think? You’re not really 
out. are you?” 

“No — affairs?” 

“ Heart affairs, you know. Dear me! why, before I was your 
age, I was engaged to James Fluke Dyson, down Boston way.” 

“ Are you to marry him, then?” 

“ Me? No, thanks! I never meant to marry him. He did to 
go about with, and it made Victoria Boker right mad. Then 
mother came to Europe; he and I vowed constancy and exchang- 
ed rings and hair and all that, and we did write to each other 
each mail, till I got to Paris; then X got more slack, and I dis- 
remembered to ask when the mails went out; soon after we 
heard he had burst up; wasn’t it a piece of luck?” 

“ X do not understand.” 

“ Piece of luck we came to Europe. I might have taken him 
over there. He was a fine young man, only he hadn’t the way 
your men have; nor their cheek either. His father’d always 
been thought one of the biggest note-shavers in N’York City. 
They say it was the fall in silver broke him. Anyway, poor 
James he’s a calerk in a tea store now.” 

Vere looked at her in speechless surprise. Pick-me-up laughed 
the more. 

“ Oh, they’re always at seesaw like that m our country. He’ll 


86 


MOTHS. 


snake another pile,p dare say, by next year, and they’ll all get on 
their legs again. Your people, when they’re bowled over, lie 
down; ours jump up: I surmise it’s the climate. I like your men 
best, though; they look such swells, evenj when they’re in blanket 
coats and battered old hats, such as your cousin Mull wears.” 

“ Is it true that Frank wished to succeed Mr. James Fluke 
Dyson?” Vere asked, after a sore struggle with her disgust. 

“Who’s Frank?” 

“ My cousin Mull.” 

“ Is he Frank? Dear life I I always thought dukes were dukes, 
even in the bosom of their families. Yes; he was that soft on 
me — there, they all are, but he’s the worst I ever saw. I said no, 
but I could whistle him back. I’m ’most sorry I did say no. 
Dukes don’t grow on every apple-bough; only he’s poor, they 
say ” 

“ He is poor,” said Yere, coldly, her disgust conquering all 
amusement. 

“ When I came across the Pond,” said Miss Leach, continuing 
her own reflections, “I said to mother, ‘ I’ll take nothing but a 
duke. " I always had a kind of fancy for a duke. There’s such a 
few of them. I saw an old print once in Broadway, of a Duch- 
ess of Northumberland, holding her coronet out in both hands. I 
said to myself then, that was how I’d be taken some day 

“ Do you think duchesses hold their coronets in their hands, 
then?” 

“Well, no; I see they don’t; but I suppose one would in a pict- 
ure.” 

“ I think it would look very odd, even in a picture.” 

“ What’s the use of having one, then? There aren’t corona- 
tions every day. They tell me your cousin might be rolling in 
money if he liked. Is it true he’d have five hundred pounds 
sterling a day if he bored for coal? One could live on that.” 

“ He would never permit the forest to be touched to save his 
life!” said Yere, indignantly, w;ith a frown and a flush. “ The 
forests are as old as the days of Hengist and Horsa; the wild 
bulls are in them, and the red deer; men crept there to die after 
Otterbourne; under one of the oaks, King James saw Johnie 
Armstrong ” 

Fuschia Leach showed all her pretty teeth. “ Yery touchin’, 
but the coal was under them before that, I guess! That’s much 
more to the point. I come from a business-country. If he’ll 
hear reason about that coal, I'm not sure I won’t think twice 
about ycur cousin.” 

Vere, without ceremony, turned away. She felt angry tears 
swell her throat and rise into her eyes. 

“ Oh, you turn up your nose!” said Fuschia Leach, vivaciously, 
“You think it atrocious that new folks should carry off your 
brothers and cousins and friends. Well, I'd like to know where 
it’s worse than all your big nobility going down at our feet for 
our dollars. I don’t say your English do it so much, but they do 
do it, your younger sons and all that small fry; and abroad we 
can buy the biggest and best titles in all Europe for a few hun- 
dred thousand dollars a year. That’s real mean! That’s black- 


MOTHS 


9t 

fog boots, if you please. Men with a whole row of Crusaders at 
their backs, men as count their forefathers right away into Julius 
Caesar’s times, men that had uncles in the ark with Noah, they’re 
at a Yankee pile like flies around molasses. Wal, now,” said the 
pretty American, with her eyes lighting fiercely and with sparks 
of scorn flashing out from them — “ wal, now, you’re all of you that 
proud that you beat Lucifer, but as far as I see there aren’t much 
to be proud of. We’re shoddy over there. If we went to Boston we 
wouldn’t get a drink, outside a hotel, for our lives. N’ York, 
neither, don’t think because a man’s struck ile he’ll go to heaven 
with Paris thrown in. But look at all your big folk! Pray what 
do they do the minute shoddy comes their way over the pickle- 
field? Why, they just eat it! Kiss it and eat it! Do you guess 
we’re such fools we don’t see that? Why, your Norman blood 
and Domesday Book and all the rest of it — pray hasn’t it married 
Lily Peart, whose father kept the steamboat hotel in Jersey City 
and made his pile selling soothers to the heathen Chinee? Who 
was your Marchioness of Snowdon if she weren’t the daughter 
of old Sam Salmon the note- shaver? Who was your Duchess 
de Dagobert, if she weren’t Aurelia Twine, with seventy million 
dollars made in two years out of oil? Who was y our Princess 
Buondelmare, if not Lotty Miller, who was bom in Nevada and 
baptized with gin in a miner’s pannikin? We know ’email! And 
Blue Blood’s taken ’em because they had cash. That’s about it! 
Wal, to my fancy, there aren’t much to be proud of anyhow, 
and it aren’t only us that need be laughed at ” 

“It is. not,” said Yere, who had listened in bewilderment. 
“ There is veiy much to be ashamed of on both sides.” 

“ Shame’s a big thing — a four-horse concern,” said the other, 
with some demur. “ But if any child need be ashamed, it is 
not this child. There’s a woman in Rome, Anastasia W. Crash; 
her father’s a colored person. After the war he turned note- 
shaver and made a pile; Anastasia aren’t colored to signify; she 
looks like a Creole, and she’s handsome. It got wind in Rome 
that she was going there, and had six million dollars a year safe; 
and she has that; it’s no lie. Well, in a week she could pick and 
choose among the Roman princes as if they were bilberries in a 
hedge, and she’s taken one that’s got a name a thousand years 
old — a name that every school-girl reads out in her history-books, 
when she reads about the popes! There! And Anastasia W. 
Crash is a colored person with us; with us we would not go in 
the same car with her, nor eat at the same table with her. What 
do you think of that?” 

“ I think your country is very liberal, and that your ‘ colored 
person* has'avenged all the crimes of the Borgias.” 

The pretty American looked at her suspiciously. 

“ I guess I don’t understand you,” she said, a little sulkily. 
u I guess you’re very deep, aren’t you?” 

“Pardon me,” said Yere, weary of the conversation; “if 
you will excuse me I will leave you now: we are going to 
ride ” 

“Ride? Ah! That’s agthing I don’t cotton to, anyhow,” said 
Hiss Fuschia Leach, who had found that her talent did not_ lie 


MOTHS. 


«8 

that way, and could never bring herself to comprehend how prin- 
cesses and duchesses could find any pleasure in tearing over 
bleak fields and jumping scratching hedges. A calor if ere at 
eighty degrees always, a sacque from Sirandin’s, an easy-chair 
and a dozen young men in various stages of admiration around 
her— that was her idea of comfort. Everything out of doors 
made her chilly. 

She watched Vere pass away, and laughed, and yet felt sorry. 
She herself was the rage because she was a great beauty and a 
great flirt; because she had been -signaled for honor by a prince 
whose word was law; because she was made for the age she lived 
in, with a vulgarity that was chic, and an audacity that was unri- 
valed, and a delightful mingling of utter ignorance and intense 
shrewdness, of slavish submission to fashion and daring eccentric- 
ity in expression, that made her to the jaded palate of the world, 
a social caviare, a moral absinthe. Exquisitely pretty, perfectly 
dressed, as dainty to look at as porcelain, and as common to talk 
to as a camp-follower, she like many of her nation, had found 
herself, to her own surprise, an object of adoration to that great 
world of which she had known nothing except from the imagina- 
tive columns of “ own correspondents.” But Fuschia Leach was 
no fool, as she said often herself, and she felt, as her eyes followed 
Yere, that this calm, cold child, with her great contemptuous 
eyes and her tranquil voice, had something she had not — some- 
thing that not all the art of Mr. Worth could send with his con- 
fections to herself. 

“ My word! I think I’ll take Mull just to rile her!” she thought 
to herself, and thought, too, for she was good-natured and less 
vain than she looked, “ perhaps she’d like me a little bit then; 
and then, again, perhaps she wouldn’t. 

“ That girl’s worth five hundred of me, and yet they don’t see 
it!” she mused now, as she pursued Vere’s shadow with her eyes 
across the lawn. She knew very well that with some combina- 
tion of scarlet and orange or sage and maize upon her, in some 
miracle of velvet and silk, with a cigarette in her mouth, a 
thousand little curls on her forehead, the last slang on her lips, 
and the last news on her ear, her own generation would find her 
adorable while it would leave Yere Herbert in the shade. And 
yet she would sooner have been Yere Herbert; yet she would 
sooner have had that subtle, nameless, unattainable “some- 
thing ” which no combination of scarlet and orange, of sage and 
maize, was able to give, no imitation or effort for half a lifetime 
would teach. 

“ We don’t raise that sort, somehow, our way,” she reflected, 
wistfully. 

She let the riding-party go out with a sigh of envy — the 
slender figure of Vere foremost on a mare that few cared to 
mount — and went herself to drive in a little basket-carriage 
with the Princess Nelaguine, accompanied by an escort of her 
own more intimate adorers, to call at two or three of the maison- 
nettes scattered along the line of the shore between Felicite 
and Yillers. 

w Strikes me I’ll have to take that duke after all,’* she thought 


MOTHS. 69 

to herself; he would come to her sign, she knew, r as a hawk to 
the lure. 

That day Prince Zouroff rode by Vere's side, and paid her 
many compliments on her riding and other things; but she 
scarcely heard them. She knew she could ride anything, as she 
told him; and she thought every one could who loved horses; and 
then she barely heard the rest of his pretty speeches. She was 
thinking, with a bewildered disgust, of the woman whom Fran- 
cis Herbert, Duke of Mull and Cantire, was willing to make her 
cousin. 

She had not comprehended one tithe of Pick-me-up's jargon, 
but she had understood the menace to the grand, old, somber 
border forests about Castle Herbert, which she loved with a lov* 
only second to that she felt for the moors and woods of Bulmer t 

“ I would sooner see Francis dead than see him touch tho»^ 
trees!” she thought, with what her mother called her terribte? 
earnestness. 

And she was so absorbed in thinking of the shame of such a 
wife for a Herbert of Mull, that she never noticed the glances 
Zouroff gave her, or dreamed that the ladies who rode with her 
were saying to one another: 

“ Is it possible? Can he be serious?” 

Vere had been accustomed to rise at six and go to bed at ten, 
to spend her time in serious studies or open-air exercise. She 
was bewildered by a day which began at one or two o’clock in 
the afternoon and' ended at cockcrow or later. She was harassed 
by the sense of being perpetually exhibited and unceasingly criti- 
cised. Speaking little herself, she listened, and observed, and 
began to understand all that Correze had vaguely warned her 
against; to see the rancor underlying the honeyed words, the 
enmity concealed by the cordial smile, the hate expressed in 
praise, the effort masked in ease, the endless strife and calumny 
and cruelty and small conspiracies which make up the daily life 
of men and women in society. Most of it was still a mystery to 
her; but much she saw, and grew heartsick at it. Light and vain 
temperaments find their congenial atmosphere in the world of 
fashion, but hers was neither light nor vain, and the falseness of 
it oppressed her. 

“You are a little Puritan, my dear!” said Lady Stoat, smiling 
at her. 

“Pray be anything else rather than that!” said Lady Dolly, 
pettishly. “ Everybody hates it. It makes you look priggish 
and conceited, and nobody believes in it even. That ever a child 
of mine should have such ideas !” 

“ Yes, it is very funny!” said her dear Adine, quietly. “ You 
neglected her education, pussy. She is certainly a little Puritan. 
But we should not laugh at her. In these days it is really very 
interestingto see a girl who can blush, and who does not under- 
stand the French of the Petits Jovrnanx, though she knows the 
French of Marmontel and of Massillon.” 

“Who cares for Marmontel and Masillon?” said Lady Dolly, in 
disgust. 

She was flattered by the success of Vere as a beauty, and irri« 


70 


MOTHS 


tated by her failure as a companionable creature. She was 
triumphant to see the impression made by the girl’s blending of 
sculptural calm and childlike loneliness; she was infuriated a 
hundred times a day by Yere’s obduracy, coldness, and unwise 
directness of speech. 

“It is almost imbecility,” thought Lady Dolly, obliged to 
apologize continually for some misplaced sincerity or obtuse neg- 
ligence with which her daughter had offended people. 

“You should never froisser other people; never, never!” said 
Lady Dolly. “ If Nero, and-what-was-her-name that began with 
an M, were to come in your world, you should be civil to them ; 
you should be charming to them so long as they were people that 
were received. Nobody is to judge for’ themselves — never. If 
society is with you, then you are all right. Besides, it looks so 
much prettier to be nice and charitable and all that; and, besides, 
what do you know, you chit?” 

Yere was always silent under these instructions; they were 
but little understood by her. When she did froisser people it 
was generally because their consciences gave a sting to her sim- 
ple frank words of which the young speaker herself was quite 
unconscious. 

“Am I a Puritan?” Yere thought, with anxious self-examina- 
tion. In history she detested the Puritans: all her sympathies 
were with the other side. Yet she began now to think that, if 
the Stuart court ever resembled Felicite, the Puritans had not 
perhaps been so very far wrong. 

Felicite was nothing more or worse than a very fashionable 
house of the period; but it was the world in little, and it hurt her, 
bewildered her, and in many ways disgusted her. 

If she had been stupid, as her mother thought her, she would 
have been amused or indifferent; but she was not stupid, and 
she was oppressed and saddened. At Bulmer she had been 
reared to think truth the first law of life, modesty as natural to a 
gentlewoman as cleanliness, delicacy and reserve the attributes 
of all good breeding, and sincerity indispensable to self- 
respect. At Felicite, who seemed to care for any one of these 
things? 

Lady Stoat gave them lip-service; indeed, but with that excep- 
tion, no one took the trouble even to render them that question- 
able homage which hypocrisy pays to virtue. 

In a world that was the really great world, so far as fashion 
went and rank (for the house-party at Felicite was composed of 
people of the purest blood and highest station, people very exclu- 
sive, very prominent, and very illustrious), Yere found things 
that seemed passing strange to her. When she heard of profes- 
sional beauties, whose portraits were sold for a shilling, and 
whose names were as cheap as red herrings, yet who were re- 
ceived at court and envied by princesses; when she 'saw that men 
were the wooed, not the wooers, and that the art of flirtation 
was reduced to a tournament of effrontery; when she saw a great 
duchess go out with the guns, carrying her own chokebore by 
Purdy and showing her slender limbs in gaiters; when die saw 
married women not much older than herself spending hour after 


MOTHS. 


71 


hour in the fever of chemin de fer ; when she learned that they 
were very greedy for their winnings to be paid, but never dreamt 
of being asked to pay their losses; when she saw these women 
with babies in their nurseries, making unblushing love to other 
women’s husbands, and saw every one looking on the pastime as 
a matter of course quite good-naturedly; when she saw one of 
these ladies take a flea from her person and cry, Qui m* crime 
Vavale, and a prince of semi-royal blood swallow the flea in a 
glass of water; when to these things, and a hundred others like 
them, the young student from the Northumbrian moors was the 
silent and amazed listener and spectator, she felt indeed lost in a 
strange and terrible world; and something that was very like 
disgust shone from her clear eyes and closed her proud .mouth. 

Society as it was filled her with a very weariness of wonder, a 
cold and dreary disenchantment, like the track of gray mire 
that in the mountains is left by the descent of the glacier. But 
her mother was more terrible to her than all. At the thought of 
her mother, Vere, even in solitude, felt her cheek burn with an 
intolerable shame. When she came to know something of the 
meaning of those friendships that society condones — of those 
jests which society whispers between a cup of tea and a cigar-, 
ette— of those hints which are enjoyed like a bonbon, yet contain 
all the enormities that appalled Juvenal — then the heart of 
Yere grew sick, and she began slowly to realize what manner of 
woman this was that had given her birth. 

“ My dear, your pretty daughter seems to sit in judgment on 
us all! I am sadly afraid she finds us wanting,” said the great 
lady who had signalized herself with utilizing a flea. 

“ Oh, she has a dreadful look, I know,” said Lady Dolly, dis- 
tractedly. “ But, you see. she has been always with that odious 
old woman. She has seen nothing. She is a baby.” 

The other smiled. 

“ When she has been married a year, all that will change. She 
will leave it behind with her maiden sashes and shoes. But I am 
not sure that she will marry quickly, lovely as she is. She 
frightens people, and, if you don’t mind my saying so, she is 
rude. The other night when we had that little bit of fun about 
the flea she rose and walked away, turned her back positively, as 
as if she were a scandalized dowager. Now, you know, that 
doesn’t do nowadays. The age of saints is gone by ” 

“If there ever were one,” said Lady Dolly, who occasionally 
forgot that she was very high church in her doctrines. 

“ Yere would make a beautiful St. Ursula,” said Lady Stoat, 
joining them. “ There is war as well as patience in her counter 
nance; she will resist actively as well as endure passively.” 

“ What a dreadful thing to say !” sighed Lady Dolly. 

The heroine of the flea erotic laughed at her. 

“ Marry her, my dear. That is what she wants.” 

She herself was only one-and-twenty, and had been married 
four years, had some little flaxen bundles in nurses’ arms that 
she seldom saw, was deeply in debt, had as many adorers as she 
had pearls and diamonds, and was a very popular and admired, 
personage. 


12 


MOTHS . 


“Why can't yon get on with people?” Lady Dolly would ash 
Vere, irritably. 

“I do not think they like me,” said Vere, very humbly; and 
her mother answered, very sharply and sensibly: 

“ Everybody is liked as much as they wish to be. If you show 
people you like them, they like you. It is perfectly simple. 
You get what you give, my dear, in this world. But the sad 
truth is, Vere, that you are unamiable.” 

Was she in truth unamiable? 

She felt the tears gather in her eyes. She put her hand on the 
hound Loris’s collar, and went away with him into the gardens 
■ — the exquisite gardens with the gleam of the sea between the 
festoons of their roses that no one hardly ever noticed except 
herself. In a deserted spot where a marble Antinous reigned 
over a world of gardenias, she sat down on a rustic chair and 
put her arm round the dog’s neck and cried like the child that 
she was. 

She thought of the sweet-brier bush on the edge of the white 
cliff. Oh, if only Correze had been here to tell her what to do! 

The dog kissed her in his own way, and was sorrowful for her 
sorrow; the sea- wind stirred the flowers; the waves were near 
enough at hand for their murmuring to reach her; the quietness 
and sweetness of the place soothed her. 

She would surely see Correze again, she thought; perhaps in 
Paris, this very winter, if her mother took her there. He would 
tell her if she were right or wrong in having no sympathy with 
all these people; and the tears still fell down her cheeks as she 
sat there and fancied she heard that wondrous voice rise once 
more above the sound of the sea. 

“Mademoiselle Vera, are you unhappy? and in Felicite!” said 
a voice that was very unlike that unforgotten music — the voice of 
Sergius Zouroff. 

Vere looked up startled, with her tears still wet. like dew. 

Zouroff had been kindness itself to her, but her first disgust for 
him had never changed. She was alarmed and vexed to.be found 
by him, so, alone. 

“ftWhat frets you?” he said, with more gentleness than often 
came into his tones. “ It is a regret to me as your host, that you 
should know any regret in Felicite. If there be anything I can 
do, command me.” 

“You are very good, monsieur,” said Vere, hesitatingly. 
“It is nothing, very little, at least; my mother is vexed with 
me.” 

“ Indeed! Your charming mother, then, for once must be in 
the wrong. What is it?” 

“Because people do not like me.” 

“ Who is barbarian enough not to like you? I am a barbarian, 
but—” 

His cold eyes grew eloquent, but she did not see their gaze, for 
she was looking dreamily at the far-off sea, 

“ No one likes me,” said Vere, wearily, “ and my mother thinks 
& is my fault. No doubt it is. I do not care for what they cars* 


MOTHS. 


73 


for; but then they do not care for what I love— the gardens, the 
woods, the sea, the dogs. 5 * 

She drew Loris close as she spoke, and rose to go. She did not 
wish to he with her host. But Zouroff paced by her side. 

“ Loris pleases you? Will you give him the happiness of being 
calLed yours?” 

Vere for once raised a bright and grateful face to him, a flush 
of pleasure drying her tears. 

“ Mine? Loris? Oh, that would be delightful!— if mamma will 
let me.” 

M Your mother will let you,” said Zouroff, with an odd smile. 

Loris is a fortunate beast, to have power to win your fancy 

44 But I like all dogs ” 

“ And no men?” 

“ I do not think about them.” 

It was the simple truth. 

“ I wish I were a dog!” said Sergius Zouroff. 

Yere laughed for a moment, — a child's sudden laugh at a droll 
idea; then her brows contracted a little. 

“ Dogs do not flatter me,” she said, curtly. 

“Nor do I —foi dhonneur! But, tell me, is it really the fact 
that cruel Lady Dolly made you weep? In my house too! I am 
very angry. I wish to make it Felicite to you beyond any other 
of my guests.” 

“ Mamma was no doubt right, monsieur,” said Yere, coldly. 
“ She said that I do not like people, and I do not.” 

“ Dame! you have very excellent taste, then,” said Zouroff, 
with a laugh. “ I will not quarrel with your coldness, Mademo- 
iselle Yera, if you will only make an exception for me.” 

Yere was silent. 

Zouroff’s eyes grew impatient and fiery. 

“ Will you not even like me a little for Loris’ sake?” 

Vere stood still in the rose-path, and looked at him with seri- 
ous serene eyes. 

“ It was kind of you to give me Loris, that I know, and I am 
grateful for that; but I will not tell you what is false, monsieur; 
it would be a veiy bad return.” 

“ God in heaven! is she the wiliest coquette by instinct, or only 
the strangest child that ever breathed?” thought Zouroff, as he said 
aloud, “ Why do you not like me, mon enfant ?' 

Yere hesitated a moment. 

“ I do not think you are a good man.” 

“ And why am I so unfortunate as to give you that opinion of 
me?” 

“ It is the way you talk; and you kicked Loris one day last 
week.” 

Sergius Zouroff laughed aloud, but he swore a heavy oath un- 
der his breath. 

“ Your name in Russian means Truth. You are well named, 
Mademoiselle Yere,” he said, carelessly, as he continued to walk 
by her side. “ But I shall hope to make you think better things 
of me vet, and I can never kick Loris again, as he is now yours, 
without your permission,” 


•*4 


MOTHS. X 

“ You~will never have that,” said Vere, with a little smile, as 
she thought, with a pang of compunction, that she had been very 
rude to a host who was courteous and generous. 

Zouroff moved on beside her, gloomy and silent. 

‘‘Take my arm, mademoiselle,” he said, suddenly, as they were 
approaching the chateau. Yere put her hand on his arm in timid 
compliance; she felt that she must have seemed rude and thank* 
less. They crossed the smooth lawns that stretched underneath 
the terraces of Felicite. 

It was near sunset, about seven o’clock; some ladies were out 
on the terrace, amidst them Lady Dolly and the heroine of the 
flea. They saw Zouroff cross the turf, with the girl in her white 
Gainsborough dress beside him, and the hound beside her. 

Lady Dolly’s heart gave a sudden leap, then stopped its beats 
in suspense. 

“ Positively — I do — think ” murmured the lady of the flea, 

and then fell back in her chair in a fit of uncontrollable laughter. 

Vere loosened her hand from her host’s arm as they ascended 
the terrace steps, and came straight to her mother. 

“ Monsieur Zouroff has given me Loris!” she cried, breathless- 
ly, for the dog was to her an exceeding joy. “ You will let me 
have Loris, mamma?” 

“Let her have Loris,” said Zouroff, with a smile that Lady 
Dolly understood. 

“Certainly, since you are so kind, prince,” she said, charming- 
ly. “ But a dog! It is such a disagreeable thing; when one 
travels especially. Still, since you are so good to that naughty 
child, who gives all her heart to the brutes ” 

“ I am happy that she thinks me a brute, too,” said Zouroff, 
with a grim smile. 

The ladies laughed. 

Yere did not hear or heed. She was caressing her new 
treasure. 

“I shall not feel alone now with Loris,” she was saying to 
herself. The dull fierce eyes of Sergius Zouroff were fastened 
on her, but she did not think of him, nor of why. the women 
laughed. 

Lady Dolly was vaguely perplexed. 

“ The girl was crying half an hour ago,” she thought. “ i 
haps she is deeper|than one thinks. Perhaps she means to draw 
him on that way. Anyhow, her way appears to answer; but it 
hardly seems possible — when one thinks what he has had thrown 
at his head and never looked at! And Vere! such a rude crea- 
ture, and sugIi a simpleton!” 

Yet a sullen respect began to enter into her for her daughter— 
the respect that women of the world only give to a shrewd talent 
for finesse. If she were capable at sixteen of “ drawing on ” the 
master of Felicite thus ably, Lady Dolly felt that her daughter 
might yet prove worthy of her, might still become a being with 
whom she could have sympathy and community of sentiment. 
And yet Lady Dolly felt a sort of sickness steal over her as she 
saw the look in his eyes which Vere did not see. 


MOTHS . 


75 

“ It will be horrible! horrible!” she said to herself. “ Why did 
Adine ever tell me to come here?” 

For Lady Dolly was never in her own eyes the victim of her 
own follies, but always that of some one else’s bad counsels. 

Lady Dolly was frightened when she thought that it was pos- 
sible that this scorner of unmarried women would be won by her 
own child. But she was yet more terrified when the probable 
hopelessness of any such project flashed on her. 

The gift of the dog might mean everything and might mean 
nothing. 

“What a constant misery she is!” she mused. “Oh, why 
wasn’t she a boy? They go to Eton, and if they get into trouble 
men manage it all; and they are useful to go about with if you 
want stalls at a theatre, or an escort that don’t compromise you. 
But a daughter! 

She could have cried, dressed though she was for dinner, in a 
combination of orange and deadleaf, that would have consoled 
any woman under any affliction 

“ Do you think he means it?” she whispered to Lady Stoat, who 
answered, cautiously. 

“ I think he might be made to mean it.” 

Lady Dolly sighed, and looked nervous. 

Two days later, Loris had a silver collar on his neck that had 
just come from Paris. It had the inscription on it of the Trou- 
badour’s motto for his mistress’s falcon: 

“ Quiconque me trouvera, qyCil me mene a ma maitresse: pour 
recompense il la verra.” 

Vere looked doubtfully at the collar; she preferred Loris with- 
out it. 

“He does mean it,” said Lady Dolly to herself, and her pulses 
fluttered strangely. 

“ I’d have given you a dog if I’d known you wished for one,” 
said John Jura moodily that evening to Vere. She smiled and 
thanked him. 

“ I had so many dogs about me at Bulmer I feel lost without 
one, and Loris is very beautiful ” _ 

Jura looked at her with hard scrutiny. 

“ How do you like the giver of Loris?” 

Vere met his gaze unmoved. 

“ I do not like him at all,” she said, in a low tone. “ But per- 
haps it is not sincere to say so. He is very kind, and we are in 
his house.” 

“ My dear, that we are in his house, or that he is in ours, is the 
very reason to abuse a man like a thief! You don’t seem to 
understand modern ethics,” said the heroine of the flea epic, as 
she passed near, with a little laugh, on her way to play chemin 
defer in the next drawing-room. 

“ Don’t listen to them,” said Jura, hastily. “ They will do you 
no good; they are all a bad lot here.” 

“But they are all gentle-people?” said Vere, in some astonish- 
ment. “ They are ail gentlemen and gentlewomen born.” 

“ Oh, born!” said Jura, with immeasurable contempt. “ Oh, 
yes! they’re all in the swim, for that matter; but they are about 


"0 


MOTHS. 


as bad a set as there is in Europe; not but what it is much the 
same everywhere. They say the Second Empire did it. I don’t 
know if it’s that, but I do know that ‘gentlewomen,’ as you call 
it, are things one never sees nowadays anywhere in Paris or Lon- 
don. You have got the. old grace, but how long will you keep 
it? They will corrupt you; and if they can’t, they’ll ruin you.” 

“ Is it so easy to be corrupted or to be ruined?” 

“Easy as blacking your glove,” said Jura, moodily. 

Vere gave a little sigh. Life seemed to her very difficult. 

“I do not think they will change me,” she said, after a few 
moments’ thought. 

“I don’t think they will; but they will make you pay for it. 
If they say nothing worse of you than that you are ‘odd,’ you 
will be lucky. How did you become what you were? You, 
Dolly’s daughter!” 

Vere colored at the unconscious contempt with which he spoke 
the two last words. 

“ I try to be what my father would have wished,” she said, 
under her breath. 

Jura was touched. His blue eyes grew dim and reverential. 

“I wish to Heaven your father may watch over you!” he said, 
in a husky voice. “ In our world, my dear, you will want some 
good angel — bitterly. Perhaps you will be your own, though. 

I hope so.” 

His hand sought hers and caught it closely for an instant, and 
he grew very pale. Vere looked up in a little surprise. 

“You are very kind to think of me,” she said, with a certain 
emotion. 

“ Who would not think of you?” muttered Jura, with a dark- 
ness on his frank, fair, bold face. “ Don’t be so astonished that 
I do,” he said, with a little laugh, whose irony she did not under- 
stand. “ You know I am such a friend of your mother’s?” 

“ Yes,” said Vere, gravely. 

She was perplexed. He took up her fan and unfurled it. 

‘Who gave you this thing? It is an old one of Dolly’s; I 
bought it in the Passage Choiseul mvself: it’s not half good 
enough for you now. I bought one at Christie’s, last winter, that 
belonged to Maria Theresa; it has her monogram in opals; it was 
oamted by Fragonard, or one of those beggars; I will send for it 
for you if you will please me by taking it.” 

“ You are very kind,” said Vere. 

“That is what you say of Serge Zouroff!” 

She laughed a little. 

“Hike you better than Monsieur Zouroff.” 

Jura’s face flushed to the roots of his fair, crisp curls. 

“And as well as your favored singer?” 

“ Ah, no!” Vere spoke quickly, and with a frown on her 
pretty brows. She was annoyed at the mention of Correze. 

Lady Dolly approached at that moment — an apparition of 
white lace and nenuphars , with some wonderful old cameos as or- 
naments. 

“ Take me to the tea-room, Jack,” she said, sharply. “ Clemen* 


corns'. 


77 


tin© de Vrille is winning everywhere again; it is sickening. I 
believe she marks the aces!” 

Jura gave her his arm. 

Vere, left alone, sat lost in thought. It was a strange world. 
No one seemed happy in it, or sincere. Lord Jura, whom her 
mother treated like a brother, seemed to despise her more than 
any one; and her mother seemed so say that another friend, who 
was a French duchess, descended from a Valois, was guilty of 
cheating at cards! 

Jura took the white lace and nenuphars into the tea-room. He 
was silent and preoccupied. Lady Dolly wanted pretty attem 
tions, but their day was over with him. 

“ Is it true,” he said abruptly to her, “that Zouroff wants your 
daughter?” 

Lady Dolly smiled vaguely. 

“ Oh, I don’t know; they say many things, you know. No; I 
shouldn’t suppose he means anything. Should you?” 

“ I can’t say,” he answered, curtly. “ You wish it?” 

“ Of course I wish anything for her happiness.” 

He laughed aloud. 

“What damned hypocrites all you women are!” 

“ My dear Jura, pray ! you are not in a guard-room oz a club* 
room!” said Lady Dolly, very seriously shocked indeed. 

Lord Jura got her off his hands at length, and bestowed her op 
a young dandy who had become famous by winning the Grand 
Prix of that summer. Then he walked away by himself into the 
smoking-room, which at that hour was quite deserted. He 
threw himself down on one of the couches, and thought — moodb 
ly, impatiently, bitterly. 

“ What cursed fools we are!” he mused. What a fool he bad 
been ever to fancy that he loved the bloom of Piver’s powders, 
the slim shape of a white satin corset, the falsehoods of a dozen 
seasons, the debts of a little gamester, the smiles of a calculating 
coquette, and the five hundred things of like value that mad© 
up the human entity known as Lady Dolly! 

He could see her as he had seen her first, a little gossamer 
figure under the old elms, down by the water-side at Hurling- 
ham, when Hurlingham had been in its earliest natal days of 
glory. There had been a dinner-party for a Sunday evening; he 
remembered carrying her tea and picking her out the big straw- 
berries under the cedar. They had met a thousand times before 
that, but had never spoken. He thought her the prettiest crea- 
ture he had ever seen. She had told him to call on her at Ches- 
ham^jPlace; she was always at home at four. He remembered 
theincoming upon a dead pigeon among the gardenias, and how 
she bfad laughed, and told him to write its elegy, and he had said 
that he would if he could only spell, but he had never been able 
to spell in his life. All the nonsense, all the trifles, came back to 
his memory in a hateful clearness. That was five years ago, and 
she was as pretty as ever: Piver is the true fontaine de jouvence. 
She was not changed, but he — he wished that he had been dead 
like the blue-rock among the gardenias. 


78 


MOTHS. 


He thought of a serious sweet face, a noble mouth, a low, broad 
brow ,with the fair hair lying thickly above it. 

“ Good God!” he thought, “ who would ever have dreamt that 
she could have had such a daughter?” 

And his heart was sick, and his meditation was bitter. He 
was of a loyal, faithful, dog-like temper, yet in that moment he 
turned in revolt against the captivity that had once seemed 
sweet, and he hated the mother of Yere. 

A little later Lord Jura told his host that he was very sorry, 
regretted infinitely, and all that, but he was obliged to go up to 
Scotland. His father had a great house party there, and would 
have no denial. 

Alone, Lady Dolly said to him, “ What does this mean? what 
is this for? You know you never go to Camelot; you know that 
you go to every other house in the kingdom sooner. What did 
you say it for? And how dare you say it without seeing if it suit 
me? It doesn’t suit me.” 

“I put it on Camelot because it sounds more decent; and I 
mean to go,” said Lord Jura, plunging his hands in his pockets. 
“The truth is, Dolly, I don’t care to be in this blackguard’s 
house. He is a blackguard, and you’re wanting to get him.” 

Lady Dolly turned pale and sick. 

“ What language! How is he any more a — what you say— » 
than you are, or anybody else? And pray for what do I want 
him?” 

The broad, frank brows of Lord Jura grew stormy as he 
frowned. 

“ The man is a blackguard. There are things one can’t say to 
women. Everybody knows it. Everybody knows it. You 
don’t care; you want to get him for the child.” 

“Vera? Good gracious! What is Vera to you, if it be what 
you fancy?” 

“ Nothing!” said Lord Jura, and his lips were pressed close to- 
gether, and he did not look at his companion. 

“Then why — I should say she isn’t, indeed! — but who, in the 
name of goodness ” 

“Look here, Dolly,” said the young man, sternly. “Look 
here I’m death on sport, and I’ve killed most things, from 
stripes in the jungle to the red rover in the furrows; I don’t affect 
to be a feeling fellow, or to go in for that sort of sentiment, but 
there was one thing I never could stand seeing, and that was a 
little innocent, wild rabbit caught in a -gin-trap. My keepers 
daren’t set one for their lives. I can’t catch you by the throat 
or throttle Jouroff as I should a keeper if -I caught him at it, so I 
go to Camelot. That’s all. Don’t make a fuss. You’re going 
to do a wicked thing, if you can do it, and I won’t look on; that’s 
all.” 

Lady Dolly was very frightened. 

“ What do you know about Zouroff?” she murmured, hurriedly. 

“ Only what all Paris knows; that is quite enough.” 

Lady Dolly was relieved, and instantly allowed herself to 
grow angry. 


MOTHS. 


79 


“ All Paris! Such stuff! As if men were not all alike. Really 
one would fancy you were in love with Vera yourself!” 

“ Stop that!” said Lord Jura, sternly; and she was subdued, 
and said no more. “ I shall go this evening,” he added, care- 
lessly; “and you may as w§ll give me a book or a note or some- 
thing for the women atCamelot; it will stay their tongues here.” 

“ I have a tapestry pattern to send to your sisters,” said Lady 
Dolly, submissive but infuriated. “What do you know about 
Sergius Zouroff, Jack? I wish you would tell me?” 

“I think you know it all very well,” said Lord Jura. “1 
think you women know all about the vices under the sun, only 
vou don’t mind. There are always bookcases locked in every 
library; I don’t know why we lock ’em; women know every- 
thing. But if the man’s rich it don’t matter. If the fellows we 
used to read about in Suetonius were alive now, you’d marry 
your girls to them and never ask any questions — except about 
settlements. It’s no use my saying anything; you don’t care. 
But I tell you all the same that if you give your daughter when 
she’s scarce sixteen to that beast, you might just as well strip 
her naked and set her up to auction like the girl in La Coupe oil 
La FemmeF 

“You grow very coarse,” said Lady Dolly, coldly. 

Lord Jura left the room, and, in the morning, left the house. 

As the “ Ephemeris ’’’went slowly, in a languid wind, across the 
Channel, in the gray twilight, he sat on deck and smoked, and 
grew heavy-hearted. He was not a book-learned man, and sel- 
dom read anything beyond the sporting papers or a French 
romance; but some old verse, about the Fates making out of our 
pleasant vices whips to scourge us, crossed his mind as the woods 
and towers of Felicite receded from his sight. 

He was young; he was his own master; he was Earl of Jura, 
and would be Marquis of Shetland. He could have looked into 
those grand, gray eyes of Yere Herbert’s with a frank and honest 
love; he could have been happy; only — only — only ! 

The Maria Theresa fan came from Camelot, but Jura never re- 
turned. 

That night there was a performance in the little theater; there 
was usually one every other night. The actors enjoyed them- 
selves much more than the guests at Felicite. They all lived in 
a little maisonnette in the park, idled through their days as they 
liked, and played when they were told. When his house-party 
bored him beyond endurance, Sergius Zouroff wandered away to 
that maisonnette in his park at midnight. 

That evening the piece on the programme was one that was 
very light. Zouroff stooped his head to Lady Dolly as they were 
about to move to the theater. 

“ Send your daughter to her bed; that piece is not fit for her 
ears.” 

Lady Dolly stared and bit her lip. But she obeyed. She went 
back and touched Yere’s cheek with her fan and caressed her. 

“ My sweet one, you look pale. Go to your room; you do not 
care much for acting, and your health is so precious * 

“ He must mean it,” she thought, as they went into the pretty 


60 


MOTHS. 


theater, and the lights went round with her. The jests fell on 
deaf ears so far as she was concerned; the dazzling little scenes 
danced before her sight; she could only see the heavy form of 
Zourolf cast down in his velvet chair, with his eyes half shut, 
and his thick eyebrows drawn together in a frown that did not 
relax. 

“He must mean it,” she thought. “But how odd! Good 
Heavens! that he should care — that he should think — of what is 
fit or unfit!” 

And it made her laugh convulsively, in a sort of spasm of 
mirth, for which the gestures and jokes of the scene gave excuse. 

Yet she had never felt so wretched, never so nearly understood 
what shame and repentance meant. 

In the entr'acte Zouroff changed his place, and took a vacant 
chair by Lady Dolly, and took up her fan and played with it. 

“Miladi, we have always been friends, good friends, have we 
not?” he said, with the smile that she hated. “You know me 
well, and can judge me without flattery. What will you say if 
I tell you that I seek the honor of your daughter’s hand?” 

He folded and unfolded the fan as he spoke. The orchestra 
played at that moment loudly. Lady Dolly was silent. There 
was a contraction at the corners of her pretty rosebud-like mouth. 

“ Any mother could have but one answer to you,” she replied, 
with an effort. “ You are too good, and I am too happy!” 

“ I may speak to her, then, to-morrow, with your consent?” he 
added. 

“Let me speak to her first,” she said, hurriedly; “she is so 
young.” 

“As you will, madame! Place myself and all I have at her 
feet.” 

“ What can you have seen in her! Good Heavens!” she cried, 
in an impulse of amaze. 

“She has avoided me!” said Sergius Zouroff, and spoke the 
truth; then added, in his best manner, “And is she not your 
child? — pulchra , fila pulchrior ? — pardon the stale quotation for 
sake of the eternal truth.” 

The violins chirped softly as waking birds at dawn; the satin 
curtain drew up; the little glittering scene shone again in the 
wax-light. Lady Dolly gasped a little for breath. 

“ It is very warm here,” she murmured. “ Don’t you think if 
a window were opened? And then you have astonished me 
so ” 

She shook double her usual drops of chloral out into her glass 
that night, but they did not give her sleep. 

“I shall never persuade her !” she thought, gazing with dry, 
hot eyes at the light swinging before her mirror. The eyes of 
Vere seemed to look at her in their innocent, scornful serenity, 
and the eyes of Yere’s father, too. 

“Do the dead ever come back ?” she thought. “ Some people 
say they do.” 

And Lady Dolly, between her soft sheets, shivered, and felt 
frightened and old. 

She was on the edge of a crime, and she had a conscience. 


MOTHS. 


CHAPTER IX. 

Verb had been up with the sunrise, and out with Loris. She 
had had the pretty green park and the dewy gardens to herself ; 
she had filled her hands with more flowers than she could carry; 
her hair and her clothes were fragrant with the smell of mown 
grass and pressed thyme ; she stole back on tip-toe through the 
long corridors, through the still house, for it was only nine 
o’clock, and she knew that all the guests of Felicite were still 
sleeping. 

To her surprise, her mother’s door opened, and her mother’s 
voice called her. 

Vere went in, fresh and bright as was the summer morning 
itself, with the dew upon her hair and the smell of the blos- 
soms entering with her, and would soon be dying in the warm, 
oppressive air that was laden with the smells of anodynes and 
perfumes. 

Her mother had already been made pretty for the day, and a 
lovely torquoise-blue dressing-robe enveloped her. She opened 
her arms, and folded the child in them, and touched her forehead 
with a kiss. 

“My darling, my sweet child,” she murmured, “I have 
some wonderful news for you; news that makes me very happy, 
Vera ” 

“Yes?” said Yere, standing with wide-opened, expectant eyes, 
the flowers falling about her, the dew sparkling on her hair. 

“ Yes, too happy, my Vera, since itvsecures your happiness,” 
murmured her mother. “But perhaps you can guess, dear, 
though you are so very young, and you do not even know what 
love means. Yera, my sweetest, my old friend Prince Zouroff 
has sought you from me in marriage!” 

“Mother!” Vere stepped backward, then stood still again, a 
speechless amaze, an utter incredulity, an unutterable disgust, all 
speaking in her face. 

“Are you startled, darling?” said Lady Dolly, in her blandest 
voice. ‘ ‘ Of course you are, you are such a child. But if you 
think a moment, Yera, you will see the extreme compliment it 
is to you, the greatness it offers you, the security that the devo- 
tion of a ” 

“ Mother!” she cried again; and this time the word was a cry 
of horror — a protest of indignation and outrage. 

“Don’t call me ‘mother’ like that. You know I hate it!” 
said Lady Dolly, lapsing into the tone most natural to her. 
“ ‘Mother! mother!’ as if I were beating you with a poker, like 
the people in the police reports. You are so silly, my dear. I 
cannot think what he can have seen in you, but seen something 
he has, enough to make him wish to marry you. You are a baby, 
but I suppose you can understand that. It is a very great and 
good marriage, Vera; no one could desire anything better. You 
are exceedingly young, indeed, according^ to English notions, 
but they never were my notions, and I think a girl cannot any- 


82 MOTHS. 

!how be safer than properly married to a person desirable in 
every way ” 

Lady Dolly paused a moment to take breath ; she felt a little 
excited, a little exhausted, and there was that in the colorless 
face of her daughter which frightened her, as she had been 
frightened in her bed, wondering if the dead came back on 
earth. 

She made a little forward caressing movement, and would 
have kissed her again, but Vere moved away; her eyes were 
darkened with anger, and her lips were tremulous. 

“Prince Zouroff is a coward,” said the girl, very low but 
very bitterly. “He knows that I loathe him, and that I think 
him a bad man. How dare he — how dare he — insult me so!” 

“Insult you!” echoed Lady Dolly, with almost a scream. 
“Are you mad? Insult you! A man that all Europe has been 
wild to marry these fifteen years past! Insult you! A man 
who offers you an alliance that will send you out of a room 
before everybody except actually princesses of the blood!? 
Insult you! When was ever an offer of marriage thought an 
insult in society?” 

“I think it can be the greatest one,” said Vere, still under 
ler breath. 

“You think! Who are you, to think? Pray have no thoughts 
at all, unless they are wiser than that. You are startled, my 
dear; that is perhaps natural. You did not see he was in love 
with you, though every one elsevdid.” 

“Oh, do not say such horrid words!” 

The blood rushed to the child’s face, and she covered her ] 
eyes with her hands. She was hurt, deeply, passionately-^' 
hurt and humiliated, in a way that her mother could no more j 
have understood than she could have understood the paths! 
traveled by the invisible stars. 

“Really you are too ridiculous,” she said, impatiently. “Even! 
you, I should think, must know what love means. I believe- 
even at Bulmer you read ‘Waverley.’ You have charmed Ser- 
gius Zouroff, and it is a very great victory, and if all this sur- 
prise and disgust at it be not a mere piece of acting, you 
must be absolutely brainless, absolutely idiotic. You cannot 
seriously mean that a man insults you when he offers you a 
position that has been coveted by half Europe.” 

“When he knows that I cannot endure him,” said Vere, with 
flashing eyes; “it is an insult; tell him so from me. Oh, 
mother — mother! that you could even call me to hear such a 
thing. . . I do not want to marry any one; I do not wish 
ever to marry. Let me go back to Bulmer. I am not made 
for the world, nor it for me.” 

“You are not, indeed!” said her mother, in exasperation and 
disgust, feeling her own rage and anxiety like two strangling 
hands at her throat. “Nevertheless, into the world you will go 
as Princess Zouroff. The alliance suits me, and I am not easily 
dissuaded from what I wish. Your heroics count for nothing. 
All girls of sixteen are gushing and silly. I was too. It is an 
immense thing that you have such a stroke of good fortune. I 
quite despair of you. You are very lovely, but you are old-fash- 
ioned, pedantic, unpleasant. You have no chic. You have no 


MOTHS. 


83 


malleability. You aro handsome, and that is all. It is a won- 
derful thing that you should have made such a coup as this be- 
fore you are even out. You are quite penniless; quite, did you 
understand that? You have no claim on Mr. Vanderdecken, and 
I am not at all sure that he will not make a great piece of work 
when I leave him to pay for your trousseau, as I must do, for I 
can’t pay for it, and none of the Herberts will; thev are all poor 
and proud as church mice, and, though Zouroff will, of course, 
send you a corbeille, all the rest must come from me, and must 
be perfect and abundant, and from all the best houses.” 

Yere struck her foot on the floor. It was the first gesture of 
passion that she had ever given way to since her birth. 

“That is enough, mother!” she said aloud and very firmly. 
“Put it in what words you like to Prince Zouroff, but tell 
him from me that I will not marry him. I will not. That is 
enough.” 

Then, before her mother could speak again, she gathered up 
the dew-wet flowers in her hand and left the room. 

Lady Dolly shrugged her shoulders, and swore a little naughty 
oath, as if she had lost fifty pounds at bezique. 

She was pale and excited, offended, and very angry, but she 
was not afraid. Girls were always like that, she thought. Only, 
for the immediate moment, it was difficult. 

She sat and meditated awhile, then made up her mind. She 
had nerved herself in the night that was just past to put her 
child in the brazen hands of Moloch because it Suited her, because 
it served her, because she had let her little weak conscience sink 
utterly and down in the deeps; and, having once made up her 
mind, she was resolved to have her will. Like all w T eak people, 
she could be cruel, and she was cruel now. 

When the midday chimes rang with music from the clock- 
tower, Lady Dolly went out of her own room down-stairs. It 
was the habit at Felicite for the guests to meet at a one o’clock 
breakfast: being in the country, they thought it well to rise early. 
Sergius Zouroff, as he met her, smiled. 

“ Eh bienf he asked. 

The smile made Lady Dolly feel sick and cold, but she looked 
softly into his eyes. 

“ Dear friend, do not be in haste. My child is such a child— 
she is flattered, deeply moved, but startled. She has no thought 
of any such ideas you know; she can scarcely understand. Leave 
her to me for a day or two. Do not hurry her. This morning, 
if you will lend me a pony-carriage, I will drive over with her 
to Le Caprice and stay a night or so. I shall talk to her, and 
then * 

Zouroff laughed grimly. 

“ Ma belle, your daughter detests me; but I don't mind that. 
You may say it out; it will make no difference — to us.” 

“You are wrong there,” said Lady Dolly, so blandly and se- 
renely that even he was deceived, and believed her for once to be 
speaking the truth. “ She neither likes you nor dislikes you, be- 
cause her mind is in its chrvsalis state — isn’t it a chrysalis, the 


MOTHS . 


thing that is rolled up in a shell asleep? — and of love and mar- 
riage my Vere -is as unconscious as those china children yonder 
holding up the breakfast bouquets. She is cold, you know; that 
you see for yourself ’’ 

“ JJn beau defaut!” 

“ JJn beau defaut in a girl,” assented Lady Dolly. “Yes. 1 
would not have her otherwise, my poor fatherless darling, nor 
would you, I know. But it makes it difficult to bring her to say 
* yes,’ you see; not because she has any feeling against you, but 
simply because she has no feeling at all as yet. Unless girls are 
precocious it is always so — hush! don’t let them overhear us. We 
don’t want it talked about at present, do we?” 

“ As you like.” said Zouroff, moodily. 

He was offended, and yet he was pleased — offended because he 
was used to instantaneous victory, pleased because this gray- 
eyed maiden proved of the stuff that he had fancied her. For a 
moment he thought he would take the task of persuasion out of 
her mother’s hands and into his own, but he was an indolent 
man, and effort was disagreeable to him, and he was worried at 
that moment by the pretensions of one of the actresses at the 
maisonette, a mile off across the park. 

“ My Yera is not very well this morning. She has got a little 
chill,” volunteered Lady Dolly to Madame Nelaguine and the 
table generally. 

“ I saw Miss Herbert in the gardens as I went to bed at sun- 
rise,” said Fuschia Leach in her high, far-reaching voice. “ I 
surmise morning dew is bad for the health.” 

People laughed. It was felt there was “something” about 
Vere and her absence, and the women were inclined to think 
that, despite Loris and the silver collar, their host had not come 
to the point, and Lady Dolly was about to retreat. 

“After all, it would be preposterous,” they argued. “A 
child, not even out, and one of those Mull Herberts without a 
penny.” 

“ Won’t you come down?” said Lady Dolly, sharply, to Yere a 
little later. 

“ I will come down if I may say the truth to Prince Zouroff.” 

“ Until you accept him you will say nothing to him. It is im- 
possible to keep you here boudant like this. It becomes ridicu 
lous. What will all these women say! ... I will drive you 
over to Laure’s. We will stay there a few days, and you will 
hear reason.” 

“ I will not marry Prince Zouroff,” said Yere. 

K After her first disgust and anger that subject scarcely troubled 
her. They could not marry her against her will. She had only 
to be firm, she thought; and her nature was firm almost to stub- 
bornness. 

“We will see,” said her mother, dryly. “Get ready to go 
with me in an hour.” 

Vere, left to herself, undid the collar of Loris, made it in a 
packet, and wrote a little note, which said: 

“ I thank you very much, monsieur, for the honor that I hear 


MOTHS . 


85 


from my mother you do me, in your wish that I should marry 
you. Yet I wonder that you do wish it, because you know well 
that I have not that feeling for you which could make me care 
for or respect you. Please to take back this beautiful collar, 
which is too heavy for Loris. Loris I will always keep, and I am 
very fond of him. I should be glad if you would tell my mother 
that you have had this letter, and I beg you to believe me, 
monsieur, yours gratefully, 

“Yere Herbert.” 

She wrote the note several times, and thought that it would 
do. She did not like to write more coldly, lest she should seem 
heartless, and though her first impulse had been to look on the 
offer as an insult, perhaps he did not mean it so, she reflected; 
perhaps he did not understand how she disliked him. She direct- 
ed her packet, and sealed it, and called her maid. 

“Will you take that to Monsieur Zouroff at once?” she said. 
“ Give it to him into his own hands.” 

The maid took the packet to her superior, Adrienne; Adrienne 
the wise took it to her mistress; Lady Dolly glanced at it and 
put it carelessly aside. 

“ Ah! the dog’s collar to go to Paris to be enlarged? very well; 
leave it there; it is of no consequence just now.” 

Adrienne the wise understood very well. 

“If Mademoiselle ask you,” she instructed her underling, 
“you will say that Monsieur le Prince had the packet quit© 
safe.” 

But Yere did not even ask, because she had not lived long 
enough in the world to doubt the good faith even of a waiting- 
maid. At Bulmer the servants were old-fashioned, like the 
place, and like the Waverley novels. They told the truth, as 
they wore boots that wanted blacking. 

If the little note had found its way to Sergius Zouroff it might 
have touched his heart; it would have touched his pride, and 
Yere would have been left free. As it was, the packet reposed 
amidst Lady Dolly’s pocket-handkerchiefs and perfumes till it 
was burnt with a pastille in the body of a Japanese dragon. 

Yere, quite tranquil, went to Le Caprice in the sunny after- 
noon, with her mother, never doubting that Prince Zouroff had 
had it. 

She did not see him, and thought that it was because he had 
read her message and resented it. In point of fact she did not 
see him because he was at the maisonnette in the park, where 
the feminine portion of the troop had grown so quarrelsome and 
so exacting that they were threatening to make him a scene up 
at the chateau. 

“ What are vour great ladies better than we?” they cried, in re- 
volt. He granted that they were no better; nevertheless, the 
prejudices of society were so constituted that chateau and 
maisonnette could not meet, and lie bade their director bundle 
them all back to Paris, like a cage of dangerous animals that 
might at any moment escape* 


86 


MOTHS. 


“You will oe here for the ball for the Prince de Galles?” said 
Princess Nelaguine to Lady Dolly, who nodded and laughed. 

“ To be sure; thanks; I only go for a few days, love.” 

“ Are we coming back?” said Yere, aghast. 

“ Certainly,” said her mother, sharply, striking her ponies; and 
the child’s heart sank. 

“ But he will have had my letter,” she thought, “and then he 
will let me alone.” 

Le Caprice was a charming house, with a charming chatelaine, 
and charming people were gathered in it for the sea and the 
shooting; but Yere began to hate the pretty picturesque women, 
the sound of the laughter, the babble of society, the elegance 
and the luxury, and all the graceful nothings that make up the 
habits and pleasures of a grand house. She felt very lonely in 
it all, and when, for the sake of her beauty, men gathered about 
her, she seemed stupid because she was filled with a shy terror 
of them; perhaps they would want to marry her, too, she thought; 
and her fair, low brow got a little frown on it that made her look 
sullen. 

“Your daughter is lovely, ma chere, but she is not sweet* 
tempered like you,” said the hostess to Lady Dolly, who sighed. 

“Ah, no!” she answered, “ she is cross, poor pet, sometimes, 
and hard to please. Now, I am never out of temper, and any little 
thing amuses me that my friends are kind enough to do. I 
don’t know where Yere got her character; from some dead and 
gone Herbert, I suppose, who must have been very disagreeable 
in his generation.” 

And that night, and every night, she said the same thing to 
Yere: “You must marry Sergfus Zouroff;” and Vere every night 
replied, “ I have told him I will not. T will not.” 

Lady Dolly never let her know that her letter had been 
burned. 

“ Your letter?” she had said, when Yere spoke of it. “No; he 
never told me anything of it. But, whatever you might say, he 
wouldn’t mind it, my dear. You take his fancy, and he means 
to marry you.” 

“ Then he is no gentleman,” said the girl. 

“Oh, about that, I don’t know,” said Lady Dclly. “Yeur 
idea of a gentleman, I believe, is a man who makes himself up as 
Faust or Romeo and screams for so many guineas a night. We 
won’t discuss that.” 

Yere’s face burned, but she was mute. It seemed to her that 
her mother had grown coarse as well as cruel. There was a 
hardness in her mother that she had never felt before. That her 
letter should have been read by Sergius Zouroff, yet make no 
impression on him, seemed to her so dastardly that it left her 
no hope to move him; no hope anywhere except in her own re- 
sistance. 

Three days later, Prince Zouroff drove over to Le Caprice, and 
saw Lady Dolly alone. 

Yere was not asked for, and was thankful. Her eyes wistfully 


MOTHS. 87 

questioned her mother’s when they met, but Lady Dolly’s were 
unrevealing and did not meet her gaze. 

The house was full of movement and of mirth; there were sau~ 
teries every evening, and distractions of all kinds. Lady Dolly 
was always flirting, laughing, dancing, amusing herself; Vere 
was silent, grave, and cold. 

“ You are much younger than your daughter, Madame Dolly,” 
said an old admirer; and Lady Dolly ruffled those pretty curls 
which had cost her fifty francs a lock. 

“Ah! Youth is a thing of temperament more than of years. 
That I do think. My Vere is so hard to please, and I — every- 
thing amuses me, and every one to me seems charming.” 

But this sunny, smiling little visage changed when, every 
evening before dinner, she came to her daughter’s room, and 
urged, and argued, and abused, and railed, and entreated, and 
sobbed, and said her sermon again, and again, and again; all in 
vain. 

Vere said but few words, but they were always of the same 
meaning. 

“I will not marry Prince Zouroff,” she said always. “It is 
of no use to ask me. I will not.” 

And the little frown deepened between her eyes, and the smile 
that Correze had seen upon her classic mouth now never came 
there. She grew harassed and anxious. 

Since her letter had made no impression on him, how could 
she escape this weariness? 

One evening she heard some people in the drawing-rooms talk- 
ing of Correze. 

They said that he had been singing in “ Fidelio,” and surpass- 
ing himself, and that a young and beautiful grand duchess had 
made herself conspicuous by her idolatry of him — so conspicu- 
ous that he had been requested to leave Germany, and had re- 
fused, placing the authorities in the difficult position of either 
receding ridiculously or being obliged to use illegal force: there 
would be terrible scandal in high places, but Correze was always 
accapareur des femmes! 

Vere moved away with a beating heart and a burning 
cheek: through the murmur of the conversation around her 
she seemed to hear the exquisite notes of that one divine 
voice which had dropped and deepened to so simple and tender 
a solemnity as it had bidden her keep herself unspotted from the 
world. 

“ What would he say if he knew what they want me to do?” 
she thought. “If he knew that my mother even — my moth- 
er !’ 

For not even, though her mother was Lady Dolly, could Vere 
quite abandon the fancy that motherhood was a sweet and sacred 
altar, on which the young could seek shelter and safety from all 
evils and ills. 

The week at Le Caprice came to an end, and the four days at 
Abbaye aux Bois also, and, in the last hours of their two days at 
the Abbaye, Lady Dolly said to her daughter; 


88 MOTHS . 

“To-morrow is the Prince’s ball at Felicite, I suppose you re- 
member?” 

Vere gave a sign of assent. 

“That is the loveliest frock La Ferriere has sent you for it; if 
you had any heart you would kiss me for such a gown; but you 
have none, you never will have any.” 

Yere was silent. 

“ I must speak to you seriously and for the last time here,” 
said her mother. “We go back to Felicite, and Sergius will 
want his answer. I can put him off no longer.” 

“ He has had it.” 

“now?” said Lady Dolly, forgetting for the moment the 
letter she had burned. “Oh, your letter ? Of course he regard- 
ed it as a baby’s boutade; I am sure it was badly worded enough. 

“ He showed it you, then?” 

“ Yes, he showed it me. It hurt him, of course; but it did not 
change him,” said her mother, a little hurriedly. “ Men of his age 
are not so easily changed. I tell you once for all, Vere, that I 
shall come to you to-night for the last time for your final word, 
and I tell you that you must be seen at that ball to-morrow 
night as the fiancee of Zouroff . I am quite resolute, and I will 
have no more shillyshallying or hesitation.” 

Yere’s face grew warm, and she threw back her head with an 
eager gesture. 

“Hesitation! I have never hesitated for an instant. I tell 
you, mother, and I have told you a hundred times, I will not 
marry Prince Zouroff.” 

“ You will wear the new gown, and you shall have my pearls,” 
pursued her mother, as though she had not' heard; “ and I shall 
take care that when you are presented to his Royal Highness he 
shall know that you are already betrothed to Zouroff; it will be 
the best way to announce it nettement to the world. You will 
not wear my pearls again, for Zouroff has already ordered 
yours.” 

Yere started to her feet. 

“And I will stamp them to pieces if he give them to me; and 
if you tell the Prince of Wales such a thing of me I will tell him 
the truth and ask his help; he is always kind and good.” 

“The pearls are ordered,” said her mother, unmoved; “and 
you are really too silly for anything. The idea of 'making the 
poor prince a scene! — you have such a passion for scenes, and 
there is nothing such bad form. I shall come to you to-night, 
after dinner, and let me find you more reasonable.” 

With that Lady Dolly went out of the room, and out of thp 
house, and went on the sea with her adorers, laughing lightly 
and singing naughty little chansons not ill. But her heart was 
not as light as her laugh, and bold little woman as she was when 
she had nerved herself to do wrong, her nerves troubled her as 
she thought that the morrow was the last, the very last, day on 
which she could any longer procrastinate and dally with Sergius 
Zouroff. 

“I will go and talk to her,” said Lady Stoat, who had driven 


MOTHS. 


89 


over from Felicite, when she had been wearied by her dear 
Dolly’s lamentations, until she felt that even her friendship 
could not bear them much longer. 

“But she hates him,” cried Lady Dolly, for the twentieth 
time. 

“They always say that, dear,” answered Lady Stoat, tran- 
quilly. “They mean it, too, poor little things. It is just as 
they hated their lessons; yet they did their lessons, dear, and 
are all the better for having done them. You seem to me to 
attach sadly too much importance to a child’s boutades .” 

“If it were only boutades! But you do not know Vere.” 

“I cannot think, dear, that your child can be so very ex- 
traordinarily unlike the rest of the human species,” said her 
friend, with her pleasant smile. “Well, I will go and see this 
young monster. She has always seemed to me a little Puritan, 
nothing worse; and that you should have been prepared for, 
leaving her all her life at Bulmer Chase.” 

Lady Stoat then went up-stairs and knocked at the door of 
Vere’s chamber, and entered with the soft, silent charm of 
movement which was one of the especial graces of that 
graceful gentlewoman. She kissed the girl tenderly, regardless 
that Vere drew herself away somewhat rudely, and then sank 
down in a chair. 

“My child, do you know I am come to talk to you quite 
frankly and affectionately?” she said, in her gentle, slow voice. 
“You know what friendship has always existed between your 
dear mother and myself, and you will believe that your wel- 
fare is dear to me for her sake — very dear.” 

Vere looked at her, but did not speak. 

“An uncomfortable girl,” thought Lady Stoat, a little dis- 
i comfiited, but she resumed blandly, “Your mamma has 
brought me some news that is very pleasant to hear, and gives 
me sincere happiness, because by it your happiness, and 
through yours, hers is secured. My own dear daughter is only 
two years older than you are, Vere, and she is married, as 
you know, and ah! so happy!” 

“Happy, with the Duke of Birkenhead?” said Vere, abruptly. 

Lady Stoat was, for the moment, a little staggered. 

“What a very unpleasant child!” she thought; “and who 
would think she knew anything about poor Birk!” 

“Very happy,” she continued, aloud, “and I am charmed to 
think, my dear, that you have the chance of being equally so. 
Your mamma tells me, love, that you are a little — a little — 
bewildered at so brilliant a proposal of marriage as Prince 
Zouroff’s. That is a very natural feeling; of course you had 
never thought about any such thing.” 

“I had not thought about it,” said Vere, bluntly. “I have 
thought now* but I do not understand why he can want such 
a thing. He knows very well that I do not like him. If you 
will tell him for me that I do not, I shall be glad; my mother 
will never tell him plainly enough.” 

“My sweet Vere,” said Lady Stout, smilingly, “pray do not 
give me the mission of breaking my host’s heart; I would as soon 
break his china! Of course your mamma will not tell him any- 


90 


MOTHS . 


thing of the kind? She is charmed, my dear girl, charmed! 
What better future could she hope for, for you? The Zouroffs 
are one of the greatest families in Europe, and I am quite sure 
your sentiments, your jewels, your everything, will be worthy 
of the exalted place you will fill.” 

Vere’s face grew very cold. 

“ My mother has sent you?”’ she said more rudely than her com- 
panion had ever been addressed in al 1 her serene existence. “ Then 
will you kindly go back to her, Lady Stoat, and tell her it is of 
no use? I will not marry Prince Zouroff.” 

“ That is not very prettily said, my dear. If I am come to talk 
to you, it is certainly in your own interests only. I have seen 
young girls like you throw all their lives away for mere want of a 
little reflection.” 

“ I have reflected.” 

“Reflected as much as sixteen can! — oh, yes. But that is not 
quite what I mean. I want you to reflect, looking through the 
glasses of my experience and affection, and your mother’s. You 
are very young, Vere.” 

“Charlotte Corday was almost as voung as I am, and Jeanne 
d’Arc.” 

Lady Stoat stared, then laughed. 

“I don’t know where they come, either of them, in our argu- 
ment, but if they had been married at sixteen it would have been 
a very good thing for both of them! You are a little girl now, 
my child, though you are nearly six feet high! You are a dem- 
oiselle a marier. You can only wear pearls, and you are not even 
presented. You are no one; nothing. Society has hundreds like 
you. If you do not marry, people will fancy you are old whilst 
you are still twenty; people will say of you, ‘ She is getting pus- 
see; she was out years and years ago.’ They will say it even if 
you are handsomer than ever, and, what will be worse, you will 
begin to feel it” 

Yere was silent, and Lady Stoat thought she had made some 
impression. 

“You will begin to feel it; then you will be glad to marry any- 
body, and there is nothing more terrible than that. You will 
take a younger son of a baronet, or a secretary of legation that is 
going to Hong-Kong or Chili — anything, anybody, to get out of 
yourself and not to see your own face in the ball-room mirrors. 
Now, if you marry early, and marry brilliantly — and this mar- 
riage is most brilliant — no such terrors will await you; you can 
wear diamonds — and oh, Yere ! till you wear diamonds you do 
not know what life is — you can go where you like, as you like, 
your own mistress; you are posee; you have made yourself a 
power while your contemporaries are still debutantes in white 
frocks; you will have your children, and find all serious interests 
in them, if you like; you will have all that is best in life, in 
fact, and have it before you are twenty; you will be painted by 
Millais and clothed by Worth; you will be a politician if you 
like, or a fashionable beauty if you like, or only a great lady — 
perhaps the simplest and best thing of all; and you will be this, 


MOTHS 


at 

and have all this, merely because you married early and married 
well. My dear, such a marriage is to a girl like being sent on the 
battle-field to a boy in the army; it is the baptism of fire with 
every decoration as its rewards 1” 

“The Cross, too ?” said Yere. 

Lady Stoat, who had spoken eloquently, and, in her own light, 
sincerely, was taken aback by the irony of the accent and the 
enigma of the smile. “A most strange child,” she thought; “ no 
wonder she worries poor flighty little pussy !” 

“ The Cross? Oh, yes,” she said. “ What answers to the boy’s 
Iron Cross, I suppose, is to dance in the Quadrille d’Honneur at 
Court. Princess Zouroff would always be in the Quadrille 
d’Honneur.” 

“ Princess Zouroff may be so. I shall not. And it was of the 
Cross you wear, and profess to worship, that I thought.” 

Lady Stoat felt a little embarrassed. She bowed her head, and 
touched the Iona cross in jewels that hung at her throat. 

“ Darling, those are serious and solemn words. A great m a r- 
riage may be made subservient, like any other action of our lives, 
to God’s service.” 

“ But surely one ought to love to marry?” 

“My dear child, that is an idea; love is an idea; it doesn’t last, 
you know; it is fancy; what is needful is solid esteem ” 

Lady Stoat paused; even to her it was difficult to speak of solid 
esteem for Sergius Zouroff. She took up another and safer line 
of argument. 

“ You must learn to understand, my sweet Vere, that life is 
prose, not poetry; Heaven forbid that I should be one to urge 
you to any sort of worldliness; but, still truth is everything; 
truth compels me to point out to you that, in the age we live in, 
a great position means vast power and ability of doing good, and 
that is not a tiling to be slighted by any wise woman who would 
make her life beautiful and useful. Prince Zouroff adores you; 
he can give you one of the first positions in Europe; your mother, 
who loves you tenderly, though she may seem negligent, desires 
such a marriage for you beyond all others. Opposition on your 
part is foolishness, my child, foolishness, blindness, and rebel- 
lion.” 

The face of Yere, as she listened, lost its childish softness, and 
grew very cold. 

“ I understand; my mother does not want me, Mr. Yander- 
decken does not want me; this Russian prince is the first who 
asks for me: so I am to be sold because he is rich. I will not be 
sold!” 

“ What exaggerated language, my love. Pray do not exag- 
gerate; no one uses inflated language now; even on the stage they 
don’t: it has gone out. Who speaks of your being sold as if you 
were a slave? Quelle idee! A brilliant, a magnificent, alliance is 
open to you, that is all; every unmarried woman in society will 
envy you. I assure you, if Prince Zouroff had solicited the hand 
of my own daughter, I would have given it to him with content 
and joy.” 

“ I have no doubt you would,” said the girl, curtly. 


92 


MOTHS. 


Lady Stoat’s sweet temper rose a little under the words. 

“ You are very beautiful, my dear, but your manners leave 
very much to be desired,” she said, almost sharply. “If you 
were not poor little Dolly’s child I should not trouble myself to 
reason with you, but let you destroy yourself like an obstinate 
baby as you are. What can be your objection to Prince Sergius? 
Now, be reasonable for once; tell me.” 

“ I am sure he is a bad man.” 

“My love! What should you know about bad men, or good 
ones either?” 

“I am sure he is bad — and cruel.” 

“ What nonsense! I am sure he has been charming to you, 
and you are very ungrateful. What can have given you such 
an impression of your devoted adorer?” 

Vere shuddered a little with disgust. 

“I hate him /” she said, under her breath. 

Lady Stoat for a moment was startled. 

“ Where could she get her melodrama from?” she wondered. 
“ Dolly was never melodramatic; nor any of the Herbert people; 
it really makes one fancy poor pussy must have had a petite f ante 
with a tragic actor!” 

Aloud she answered, gently:— 

“You have a sad habit, my Yere, of using very strong words; 
it is not nice; and you do not mean one-tenth that you say in 
your haste. No Christian ever hat ;s, and in a girl such a feeling 
would be horrible — if you meant it; but you do not mean it.” 

Vere shut her proud lips closer- but there was a meaning upon 
them that made her companion hesitate, and feel uncomfortable 
and at a loss for words. 

“How wonderful that pussy should ever have had a daughter 
like this!” she thought, and then smiled in a sweet, mild way. 

“Poor Serge! That he should have been the desired of all 
Europe, only to be rejected by a child of sixteen! Really it is 
like — who was it? — winning a hundred battles and then dying of 
a cherry-stone! There is nothing he couldn’t give you, nothing 
he wouldn’t give you, you thankless little creature!” 

Vere, standing "very slender and tall, with her face averted 
and her fair head in the glow of the sunset light, made no reply; 
but her attitude and her silence were all eloquent. 

Lady Stoat thought to herself, “ Dear, dear! what a charming 
Iphigenia she would look in a. theater! but there is no use for 
all that in real life. How to convince her?” 

Even Lady Stoat was perplexed. 

She began to talk vaguely and gorgeously of the great place 
of the Zouroff family in the world; of their enormous estates, of 
their Uraline mines, of their Imperial favor, of their right to sit 
covered at certain courts, of their magnificence in Paris, their 
munificence in Petersburg, their power, their fashion, and their 
pomp. 

Vere waited, till the long discursive descriptions ended of 
themselves, exhausted by their own oratory. Then she said, 
very simply and very coldly: 


MOTHS. 


99 


“ Do you believe in God, Lady Stoat?” 

“ In God?” echoed Lady Stoat, shocked and amazed. 

“Do you or not?” 

“My dear! Goodness! Pray do not say such things to me. 
As if I were an infidel! — 77” 

“ Then how can you bid me take his name in vain, and marry 
Prince Zouroff?” 

“ I do not see the connection,” began Lady Stoat, vaguely, and 
very wearily. 

“ I have read the marriage service,” said Vere, with a passing 
heat upon her pale cheeks for a moment. 

Lady Stoat for once was silent. 

She was very nearly going to reply that the marriage service 
was of old date and of an exaggerated style; that it was not in 
good taste, and in no degree to be interpreted literally; but such 
an avowal was impossible to a woman who revered the ritual of 
her Church and was bound to accept it unquestioned. So she 
was silent and vanquished — so far. 

“ May I go now?” said Vere. 

“ Certainly, love, if you wish; but you must let me talk to you 
again. I am sure you will change and please your mother — your 
lovely little mother! — whom you ought to live for, you naughty 
child, so sweet and so dear as she is,” 

“ She has never lived for me,” thought Vere, but she did not 
say so; she merely made the deep curtsey she had learned at 
Bulmer Chase, which had the serene and stately grace in it of 
another century than her own, and, without another word, passed 
out of the room. 

“Quel enfant terrible!” murmured Lady Stoat, with a shiver 
and a sigh. 

Lady Stoat was quite in earnest, and meant well. She knew 
perfectly that Sergius Zouroff was a man whose vices were such 
as the world does not care even to name, and that his temper was 
that of a savage bull -dog allied to the petulant exactions of a 
spoilt child. She knew that perfectly, but she had known as bad 
things of her own son-in-law, and had not stayed her own daugh- 
ter’s marriage on that account. 

Position was everything, Lady Stoat thought, the man himself 
nothing. Men were all sadly much alike, she believed. Being a 
woman of refined taste and pure life, she did not even think about 
such ugly things as male vices. 

Lady Stoat was one of those happy people who only see just 
so much as they wish to see. It is the most comfortable of all 
myopisms.' She had had, herself, a husband far from virtuous, 
but she had always turned a deaf ear to all who would have told 
her of his failings. “ I do my own duty; that is enough for me,” 
she would answer, sweetly; and, naturally, she wondered why 
other woman could not be similarly content with doing theirs — 
when they had a position. Without a position she could 
imagine, good woman though she was, that things were very 
trying, and that people worried more. As for herself, she had 
never worried, and she had no sympathy with worry in any 
shape. So that when Lady Dolly came to her weeping,' excited, 


04 


MOTHS. 


furious, hopeless, over her daughter’s wicked obstinacy, Lady 
Stoat only laughed at her in a gentle, rallying way. 

“You little goose 1 As if girls were not always like thatl Sh© 
has got Correze in her head still, and she is a difficult sort of 
nature, I grant. What does it matter after all? You have only 
to be firm. She will come to reason.” 

“ But I never, never could be firm,” sobbed Lady Dolly. 
“ The Herberts are, I am not. And Vere is just like her father; 
when I asked him to have a stole and rochet and look nice, 
nothing would induce him, because he said something about his 
bishop ” 

Lady Stoat, in her superior wisdom, smiled once more. 

“Was poor Vere so very low in the matter of vestments? How 
curious! the Herberts were Catholic until James the First’s time. 
But why do you fret so? The child is a beauty, really a beauty. 
Even if she persist in her hatred of Zouroff she will marry well, 
I am sure; and she must not persist in it. You must have com- 
mon sense.” 

“But what can one do?” said Lady Dolly in desperation. “ It 
is all very easy to talk, but it is not such a little thing to force a 
girl’s will in these days; she can make a fuss, and then society 
abuses you, and I think the police even can mterfere, and the 
Lord Chancellor if she have no father.” 

And Lady Dolly sobbed afresh. 

“ Dear little goose!” said Lady Stoat, consolingly, but rather 
wearied. “ Of course nobody uses force; there are thousand 
pleasant ways: children never know what is best for them. We, 
who are their nearest and dearest, must take care of their tender, 
foolish, ignorant young lives, committed to us for guidance. 
Gwendolen even was reluctant; but now in every letter she sends 
me she says, ‘ Oh, mamma, how right you were!’ That is what 
your Vera will say to you, darling, a year hence, when she will 
have been Princess Zouroff long enough to have got used to 
him.” 

Lady Dolly shiverered a little at all that the words implied. 

Her friend glanced at her. 

“ If Zouroff cause you apprehension for any reason I am un- 
aware of,” she said, softly, “ there are others; though, to be 
sure, as your pretty child is portionless, it may be difficult ” 

“ No, it must be Zouroff,” said Lady Dolly, nervously and 
quickly. “ She has no money, as you say; and every one wants 
money nowadays.” 

“ Except a Russian,” said Lady Stoat, with a smile. “ Then, 
since you wish for him, take him now he is to be had. But I 
would advise you not to dawdle, love. Men like him, if they 
are denied one fancy, soon change to another; and he has all the 
world to console him for Vere’s loss.” 

“ I have told him he should have her answer in a day or two. 
I said she was shy, timid, too surprised; he seems to like that.” 

“Of course he likes it. Men always like it in women they 
mean to make their wives. Then, in a day or two you must 
convince her; that is all. I do not say it will be easy with her 


MOTHS . 


95 


very obstinate and peculiar temperament. But it will be pos- 
sible.” 

Lady Dolly was mute. 

She envied her dear Adine that hand of steel under the glove 
of velvet. She herself had it not. Lady Dolly was of that pliant 
temper which, according to the temperature it dwells in, becomes 
either harmless or worthless. She had nothing of the maitresse 
femme about her. She was always doing things that she wished 
were undone, and knotting entanglements that she could not 
unravel. She was no ruler of others except in a coquettish, 
petulant fashion^ of ‘‘ Jack — and the rest.” 

And she had that terrible drawback to comfort and impedi- 
ment to success — a conscience, that was sluggish and fitful, and 
sleepy and feeble, but not wholly dead. Only this consicence, 
unhappily, was like a very tiny, weak s wimmer stemming a 
very strong, opposing tide. 

In a moment or two the swimmer gave over, and the opposing 
tide had all its own way. 

After dinner that evening, whilst the rest were dancing, Vere 
slipped away, unnoticed to her own room, a little tiny turret- 
room, of which the window almost overhung the sea. She 
opened the lattice, and leaned out into the cool fragrant night. 
The sky was cloudless, the sea silvery in the moonlight; from 
the gardens below there arose the scent of datura and tuberose. 
It was all so peaceful and so sweet, the girl coukl not under- 
stand why, amidst it all, she must be so unhappy. 

Since Zouroff had had her letters there was no longer any hope 
of changing his resolve by telling him the truth, and a somber 
hatred began to grow up in her against this man, who seemed to 
her her tormentor and her tyrant. 

What hurt her most was that her own mother should urge this 
horror upon her. 

She could see no key to the mystery of such a wish except in 
the fact that her mother cruelly desired to be rid of her at all 
cost; and she had written a letter to her grandmother at Bulmer, 
Chase — a letter that lay by her on the table ready to go down 
to the post-bag in the morning. 

“ Grandmamma loves me in her own harsh way,” the child 
thought. “ She will take me back for a little time, at least, and 
then, if she do not like to keep me, perhaps 1 could keep myself 
in some way; I think I could if they would let me. I might 
go to the Fraulein in her own country and study music at 
Baireuth, and make a career of it. There would be no shame in 
that.” 

And the thought of Correze came softly over her, as the mem- 
ory of fair music will come in a day-dream. 

Not as any thought of love. She had read no romances save 
dear Sir Walter’s, which alone, of all the erring tribe of fiction, 
held a place on the dark oak shelves of the library at Bulmer, 

Correze was to her like a beautiful fancy rather than a living 
being — a star that shot across a summer sky and passed unseen 
to brighter worlds than ours. 

Me was a saint to the child— be who to himself was a sad sin* 


95 MOTHS. 

ner — and his words dwelt in her heart like a talisman against all 
evil. 

She sat all alone, and dreamt innocently of going into the 
mystic German land and learning music in all its hights and 
depths, and living nobly, and being never wedded (“ Oh, never, 
never!” she said to herself, with a burning face and a shrinking 
heart), and some day meeting Correze, the wonder of the world, 
and looking at him without shame and saying: “ I have done as 
you told me; I have never been burnt in the flame as you feared. 
Are you glad?” 

It did not, as yet, seem hard to her to do so. The world was 
to her personified in the great vague horror of Sergius Zouroff's 
name, and it cost her no more to repulse it than it costs a child 
to flee from some painted monster that gaps at it from a wall. 

This night, after Lady Stoat’s ineffectual efforts at conver- 
sion, Lady Dolly herself once more sought her daughter, and re- 
newed the argument with more asperity and more callousness 
than she had previously shown. 

Yere was still sitting in her own chamber, trying to read, but, 
in truth, always thinking of the bidding of Correze, Keep your- 
self unspotted from the world.” 

Dreaming so, with her hands buried in the golden clustering 
hair, and her lids dropped over her eyes, she started at the voice 
of her mother, and, with pain and impatience, listened with un- 
willing ear to the string of reproaches, entreaties, and censure 
that had lately become as much the burden of her day as the 
morning prayer at Bulmer had been, droned by the duchess’ 
dull voice to the sleepy household. 

Yere raised herself and listened, with that dutifulness of the 
old fashion which contrasted so strangely in her, her mother 
thought, with her rebellion and self-willed character. But she 
grew very weary. 

Lady Dolly, less delicate in her diplomacy than her friend had 
been, did not use euphuisms at all, or attempt to take any high 
moral point. Broadly and unhesitatingly she painted ail that 
Sergius Zouroff had it in his power to bestow, and the text of her 
endless sermon was, that to reject such gifts was wickedness. 

At the close she grew passionate. 

“You think of love,” she said. “ Oh, it is of no use your say- 
ing you don’t: you do. All girls do. I did. I married your 
father. We were as much in love as any creatures in a poem. 
When I had lived a month in that wretched parsonage by the 
sea, I knew what a little fool I had been. I had had such wed- 
ding-presents ! — such presents! The queen had sent me a cache- 
mire for poor papa’s sake; yet, down in that horrid place, we had 
to eat pork, and there was only a metal teapot! Oh, you smile! 
it is nothing to smile at. Yere used to smile just as you do. He 
would have taken the cachemire to wrap an old woman up in, 
very probably; and he wouldn’t have known whether he ate a 
peach or a pig. I knew; and whenever they put that tea in the 
metal teapot, I knew the cost of young love. Respect your 
father’s memory? Stuff! I am not saying anything against him, 
poor dear fellow; he was very good, — in his way, excellent; bui 


MOTHS. 


W 

he had made a mistake, and I, too. I told him so twenty times a 
day, and he only sighed and went out to his old women. I tell 
you this only to show you I know what I am talking about. Love 
and marriage are two totally different things; they ought never 
to be named together; they are cat and dog; one kills the other. 
Pray do not stare so; you make me nervous.” 

“ It is not wicked to love?” said Yere, slowly. 

“ Wicked? no; what nonsense! It amuses one; it doesn’t last.’* 

“ A great love must last, till death, and after it,” said the child, 
with solemn eyes. 

“ After it?” said Lady Dolly, with a little laugh. “ I’m afraid 
that would make a very naughty sort of place of Heaven. Don’t 
look so shocked, child." You know nothing about it. Believe 
me, dear, where two lovers go on year after year, it is only for 
Pont de Yeyle’s reason to Madame de Deffand: ‘ Nous sommes si 
mortellement ennuyes Vun de V autre que nous ne pouvons plus nous 
quitter ! * ” 

Vere was silent. Her world of dreams was turned upside down, 
and shaken rudely. 

“•You have no heart, Yere; positively none,” said her mother, 
bitterly, resuming all the old argument. “ I can scarcely think 
you are my child. You see me wearing myself to a shadow for 
your sake, and yet you have no pity. What, in heaven’s name, 
can you want? You are only sixteen, and one of the first mar- 
riages in Europe opens to you. You ought to go on your knees 
in thankfulness, and yet you hesitate!” 

“ I do not hesitate at all,” said Yere, quickly. “ I refuse!” 

She rose as she spoke, and looked older by ten years. There 
was a haughty resolve in her attitude that cowed her mother for 
an instant. 

“ I refuse,” she said again. “ And. if you will not tell Mon- 
sieur Zouroff so yourself, I will tell him to-morrow. Listen, 
mother: I have written to Bulmer, and I will go back there. 
Grandmamma will not refuse to take me in. I shall be a trouble 
and care to you no longer. I am not made for your world, nor 
it for me. I will go. I have some talent, they have always 
said, and at least I have perseverance. I will find some way of 
maintaining myself. I want so little, and I know enough of 
music to teach it; and so at least I shall be free and no burden 
upon any one.” . 

She paused, startled by her mother’s laughter— such laughter 
as she, in a later day, heard from Croizette when Croizette was 
acting her own deathbed on the stage of the Francais. 

Lady Dolly’s shrill, unnatural, ghastly laughter echoed through 
the room. 

“Is that your scheme? To teach music? And Correze to 
teach you, I suppose? O la belle idee! You little fool ! you little 
idiot ! how dare you ? Because you are mad, do you think we 
are mad, too ? Go to Bulmer now? Never ! I am your mother, 
and you shall do what I choose. What I choose is thatyou shall 
marry Zouroff.” 

“ I will not.” 


98 


MOTHS. 


“ And I say that I will not.” 

They confronted each other; the girl’s face pale, clear, and cold 
in its fresh and perfect beauty, the woman’s grown haggard, 
fevered, and fierce in its artificial prettiness. 

“ I will not,” repeated Vere, with her teeth closed. “ And my 
dead father would say I was right; and I will tell this man to- 
morrow that I loathe him; and, since surely be must have some 
pride to be stung, he will ask forme no more then.” 

“ Yere! you kill me!” screamed her mother; and, in truth, she 
fainted, her pretty curly perruque twisting off her head, her face 
deathly pallid save for the unchanging bloom of cheek and 
mouth. 

It was but a passing swoon, and her maid soon restored her to 
semi- consciousness, and then bore her to her room. 

“What a cold creature is that child!” thought Adrienne, of 
Yere. “ She sees miladi insensible, and stands there with never 
a tear, or a kiss, or a cry. What it is to have been brought up in 
England!” 

Vere, left alone, sat awhile lost in thought, leaning her head 
on her hands. Then she rang and bade them post the letter to 
Bulmer — the dark and drearsome but safe and familiar home of 
her lost childhood. 

The letter gone, she undressed and went to bed. It was mid- 
night. She soon was asleep. 

Innocent unhappiness soon finds this rest; it is the sinful sor- 
row of later years that stares, with eyes that will not close, into 
the hateful emptiness of night. 

She slept deeply and dreamlessly, the moonbeams through the 
high window finding her out where she lay, her slender limbs, 
supple as willow wands, in calm repose, and her long lashes lying 
on her cheeks. 

Suddenly she woke, startled and alarmed. A light fell on her 
eyes; a hand touched her; she was no longer alone. 

She raised herself in her bed, and gazed with a dazzled sight 
and vague terror into the yellow rays of the lamp. 

“ Vere, it is I! it is I!” cried her mother, with a sob in her 
voice. And Lady Dolly dropped on her knees beside the bed; her 
real hair dishevelled on her shoulders, her face without false 
bloom and haggard as the face of a woman of twice her own 
years. 

“ Yere, Yere, you can save me,” she muttered, with her hands 
clasped tight on the girl’s. “Oh, my dear, I never thought to 
tell you; but since you will hear no reason, what can Ido? Vere, 
wake up: listen. Iam a guilty, silly woman; guiltier, sillier, than 
you can dream. You are my child after all, and owe me some 
obedience; and you can save me. Yere, Yere, do not be cruel; do 
not misjudge me, but listen. You must marry Sergius Zouroff.” 

It was dawn when Lady Dolly crept away from her daughter’s 
chamber, shivering, ashamed, contrite, in so far as humiliation 
and regret make up contrition; hiding her blanched face with 
the hood of her wrapper, as though the faint white rays of day 1 
break w«re spectators and witnesses against her. 

Variety quite still- as she had fallen, unon her bed, * her fao© 


MOTHS 


upturned, her hands clinched, her shut lips blue as with great 
cold. She had promised what her mother had asked. 


CHAPTER X. 

On the morrrow it was known to all the guests of the house at 
which they were staying that the head of the Princes Zouroff 
was to marry the daughter of the Lady Dorothea Yanderdecken. 

On the morrow Lady Dolly drove back to Felicite, with her 
daughter beside her. 

She was victorious. 

The sun was strong, and the east wind cold, she was glad that 
they were so. The eyes of her daughter were heavy with dark 
circles beneath them, and her face was blanched to a deadly 
pallor, which changed to to a cruel crimson flush as the turrets 
and belfries of the chateau of the Zouroffs came in sight above 
the woods of its park. 

They had driven the eight miles from Le Caprice in unbroken 
silence. 

“ If she would only speak,” thought Lady Dolly; and yet she 
felt that she could not have borne it if her companion had spoken. 

They drove around to a petite entree at the back of the house, 
and were met by no one but some bowing servants. She had 
begged in a little note that it might be so, making some pretty 
plea for Yere of maiden shyness. They were shown straight to 
their rooms. It was early — noonday. 

The chateau was quite still. At night the great ball was to be 
given to tbe English princes, but the household was too well 
trained to make any disturbance with their preparations. Down 
the steps of the great terrace there was stretched scarlet 
cloth, and all the face of the building was hung with globes and 
cressets of oil, to be lit at dark. These were the only outward 
signs that anything more brilliant than usual was about to take 
place. 

“You will come to breakfast?” said Lady Dolly, pausing at 
the threshold of her room. 

It was the first word she had said to Yere since the dawn, 
when they had parted, and her own voice sounded strange to her. 

Yere shuddered as with cold. 

“ I cannot. Make some excuse.” 

“ What is the use of putting off?” said her mother, fretfully. 
“ You will be ill; you are ill. If you should be ill to-night, what 
will every one say? what will he think? what shall I do?” 

Yere went into her chamber and locked her door. She locked 
out even her maid; flung her hat aside, and threw herself for- 
ward on the bed, face downward, and there lay. 

Lady Dolly went into her chamber, and glanced at her own 
face with horror. Though made up, as well as usual, for the 
day, she looked yellow, worn,, old. 

“I must go down!” she thought; how selfish youth was, and 
how hard a thing was motherhood! She had herself dressed 
beautifully and took some ether. 


100 


MOTHS 


She had sunk her drowned conscience fathoms deep, and began 
once more to pity herself for the obstinacy and oddness of the 
child to whom she had given birth. Why could not the girl be 
like any others? 

The ether began to move in her veins and swim in her head; 
her eyes grew brighter. She went out of her room and along the 
corridor to the staircase, fastening an autumn rose or two in her 
breast, taken from the bouquet of her dressing-table. As she 
glanced down the staircase into the hall where the servants in the 
canary -colored liveries of the house were going to and fro, she 
thought of all the rank and riches of which Felicite was only one 
trifling portion and symbol, and thought to herself that — after 
all — any mother would have done as she had done, and no maid- 
en surely could need a higher reward for the gift of her inno- 
cence to the minotaur of a loveless marriage. 

“If I had been married like that!” she thought, and felt that 
she had been cruelly wronged by destiny; if she had been mar- 
ried like that, how easy it would have been to have become a 
good woman! What could Yere complain of? — the marriage was 
perfect in a worldly sense, and in any other sense — did it matter 
what it was? 

So the ether whispered to her. 

She began to taste the sweet effects of her victory, and to for- 
get the bitter, as the ether brought its consoling haze over all 
painful memories, and lent its stimulating brightness to all per- 
sonal vanities. 

After all, it was very delightful to go down those stairs, know- 
ing that when she met all those dear female friends whom she 
detested, and who detested her, no one could pity her and every 
one must envy her. She had betrothed her daughter to one of 
the richest and best-born men in all Europe. Was it not the 
crown of maternity, as maternity is understood in society? 

So down she went, and crossed the great vestibule, looking 
young, fair, and bewitching with the roses in her bosom, and an 
admirably chosen expression on her face, half glad and half 
plaintive, and with a flush under her paint that made her look 
prettier than ever; her eyes sparkled, her smile was all sunshine 
and sweetness; she pressed the hands of her most intimate 
friends with an eloquent tenderness; she was exquisitely arrayed 
with cascades of old Mechlin falling from her throat to her feet. 

“A mother only lives to be young again in her child !” she 
said, softly — and knew that she looked herself no more than 
twenty years old as she said it. 

Sergius Zouroff, profuse in delicate compliment to her aloud, 
said to himself — 

“ Brava , naughty Dolly! Bis-bis! Will she ever be like you, 
I wonder? Perhaps. The world makes you all alike after a 
little while.” 

He was ready to pay a high price for innocence, because it was 
a new toy that pleased him. But he never thought that it 
would last, any more than the bloom lasts on the peach. He 
had no illusions. Since it would be agreeable to brush it off 
himself, he was ready to purchase it. 


MOTHS. 


101 


There was a sense of excitement and disappointment in the 
whole house party; and Princesse Nelaguine ran from one to 
another, with her little bright Tartar eyes all aglow, murmuring, 
“ Charmee , Charmee, Charmee /” to impatient ears. 

“ Such a beast as he is!” said the men who smoked his cigars 
and rode his horses. 

“ And she who looked all ice and innocence!” said the women, 
already in arms against her. 

Vere did not come down to taste the first fruits of her triumph. 

At the great midday breakfast, where most people assembled, 
she was absent. Zouroff himself laid another bouquet of 
orchids by her plate, but she was not there to receive the deli- 
cate homage. 

“ Mademoiselle Vere has not risen?” he asked now, with an 
angry contraction of his low brows, as no one came near where 
the orchids were lying. 

“Vera had a. headache,” said Lady Dolly serenely, aloud. 
“ Or said so,” she murmured to his ear alone. “Don’t be an- 
noyed. She was shy. She is a little farouche, you know, my 
poor darling.” 

Zouroff nodded, and took his caviare. 

“What did I predict, love?” murmured Lady Stoat, of Stitch- 
ley, taking her friend aside after breakfast. “But how quickly 
you succeeded ! Last evening only you were in despair! Was 
the resistance only a feint? Or what persuasions did you bring 
to bear?” 

“ I threatened to send her to Buhner Chase!” said Lady Dolly, 
with a little gay laugh. Lady Stoat laughed also. 

“ I wonder what you did do,” she reflected, however, as she 
laughed. “ Oh, naughty little pussy — foolish, foolish little 
pussy! — to have any secrets from me!” 

The day wore away, and Vere Herbert remained unseen in 
Felicite. 

The guests grew surprised, and the host angered. 

Princesse Nelaguine herself had ascended to the girl’s room 
and had been denied. 

People began to murmur that it was odd. 

“ Go and fetch her,” said Zouroff, in a fierce whisper. “ It is 
time that I at least should see her — unless you have told me a 
lie.” 

“Unless she be really ill, I suppose you mean, you cruel crea- 
ture!” said her mother, reproachingly, but she obeyed him and 
went. 

“ Girls are so fond of tragedy!” reflected Lady Stoat, recalling 
episdoes in the betrothal of her own daughter, and passages that 
had preceded it. 

It was now five o’elock. The day had been chilly, as it is at 
times along the Channel shores, even in summer. Several persons 
were in the blue-room, so called because of its turquoise silk walls 
and its quantities of Delft, Nankin, Savona, and other blue china 
ranged there. It was the room for afternoon tea. Several of the 
ladies were there in tea-gowns of the quaintest and prettiest, that 
allowed them to lie about in the most gracefully tired attitudes. 


MOTHS. 


m 

The strong summer sun found its way only dimly there, and the 
sweet smells of the flowers and of the sea were overborne by the 
scent of the pastilles burning in the bodies of blue china monsters 

Zouroff, who at times was very negligent of his guests, was 
pacing up and down the long dim chamber impatiently, and 
every now and then he glanced at the door. He did not look 
once at the pretty groups, like eighteenth-century pictures tinged 
with the languor of odalisques, that were sipping tea out of tiny 
cups in an alcove lined with celadon and crackling. The tinkle 
of the tea-cups and the ripple of the talk ceased as the door at 
the farther end opened, and Vere entered, led by her mother. 

She was white, and cold, and still; she did not raise her eye- 
lids. 

Zouroff approached with eager steps, and bowed before her 
with the dignity that he could very well assume when he chose. 

“Mademoiselle,” he said, softly, “is it true that you consent 
to make the most unworthy of men the most happy?” 

He saw a slight shudder pass over her as if some cold wind had 
smitten her. 

She did not lift her eyes. 

“Since you wish, monsieur ” she answered, very low, and 

then paused. 

“ The adoration of a life shall repay you,” he murmured, in 
the conventional phrase, and kissed her hand. 

In his own thoughts he said, “Your mother has made you do 
this, and you hate me. Never mind.” 

Then he drew her hand on his arm, and led her to the Princess 
Nelaguine. 

“My sister, embrace your sister. I shall have two angels 
henceforth instead of one, to watch and pray for my erring 
soul!” 

Princess Nelaguine did not smile. She kissed the cold cheek 
of the girl with a glisten of tears in her eyes. 

“What a sacrifice! what a martyrdom!” she thought. “Ah, 
the poor child! — but perhaps he will ranger — let us hope.” 

All the while Vere might have been made of marble, she was 
so calm and so irresponsive, and she never once lifted her eyes. 

“Will you not look at me once?” he entreated. She raised 
her lids and gave him one fleeting, hunted glance. Cruel 
though he was and hardened, Sergius Zouroff felt that look go 
to his soul. 

“Bah! how she loathes me!” he said in his teeth. But the 
compassion in him died out almost as it was born, and the base 
appetites in him were only whetted and made keener by this 
knowledge. 

Lady Stoat glided toward them and lifted her lips to Vere’s 
cheek. 

“ My sweet child! so charmed, so delighted!” she whispered. 
“ Did l not say how it would be when your first shyness had 
time to fold its tents, as the poem says, and steal away?” 

“You are always a prophetess of good — and my mother's 
friend,” said Vere. They were almost the first words she had 


MOTHS. 103 

spoken, afcid they chilled even the worldly breast of her mother’s 
friend. 

There was an accent in them which told of a childhood perish- 
ed in a night — of an innocence and a faith stabbed, and stricken, 
and buried forevermore. 

“You are only sixteen, and you will never be young any 
more!” thought Princess Nelaguine, hearing the cold and bitter 
accent of those pregnant words. 

But the ladies that made the eighteenth-century picture had 
broken up and issued from the alcove, and were offering con- 
gratulations and compliments in honeyed phrases; and no one 
heeded or had time for serious thought. 

Only Lady Dolly, in a passionate murmur, cried, unheeded by 
any, in her daughter’s ear: 

“ For heaven’s sake, smile, blush, seem happy! What will they 
say of you to look at you like this? — they will say that I coerce 
you!” 

“ I do my best,” answered Vere, coldly. 

“My lovely mother-in-law,” muttered Prince Zouroff, bending 
to Lady Dolly, as he brought her a cup of tea, “ certainly you 
did not lie to me this morning when you told me that your Yere 
would marry me; but did you not lie — just a little lie, a little 
white one — when you said she would love me?” 

“ Love comes in time,” murmured Lady Dolly, hurriedly. 

Sergius Zouroff laughed grimly. 

“Does it? I feai that experience tells one rather that with 
time — it goes.” 

“Yours may; hers will come: the woman’s always comes 
last.” 

“ Ma chere, your new theories are astounding. Nevertheless, 
as your son-in-law, I will give in my adhesion to them. Hence- 
forth all the sex of your Vere — and yourself — is purity and per- 
fection in my sight!” 

Lady Dolly smiled sweetly in his face. 

“ It is never too late to be converted to the truth,” she said, 
playfully, whilst she thought, “Oh, you beast! If I could 
strangle you!” 

Meanwhile Princess Nelaguine was saying, with kindness in 
her tone and gaze: 

“ My sweet child, you look chilly and pale. Were you wise to 
leave your room out of goodness to us?” 

“I am cold,” murmured Vere, faintly. “ I should be glad if I 
might go away — for a little.” 

“Impossible,” said the princess; and added, “Dear, reflect: it 
will look so strange to people. My brother ” 

“I will stay, then,” said Vere, wearily:, and she sat down, 
and received the homage of one and the felicitations of another, 
still with her eyes always cast downward, still with her young 
face passionless and chill as a mask of marble. 

“ An hour’s martyrdom more or less — did it matter?” she said 
to herself. All her life would be a martyrdom, a long mute 
martyrdom, now. 

A few hours later her maid dressed her for the ball. She had 


104 


MOTHS . 


no need of her mother’s pearls, for those which had been ordered 
from Paris jewelers were there — the largest and purest pearls 
that ever Indian diver plunged for into the deep sea. When they 
were clasped about her they seemed to her in no way different, 
save in their beauty, from the chains locked on slave-girls 
bought for the harem. But that was because she had beer 
taught such strange ideas. 

She was quite passive. 

She resisted nothing; having given way in the one great thing, 
why should she dispute or rebel for trifles? A sense of unreality 
had come upon her, as it comes on people in the first approach 
of fever. 

She walked, sat, spoke, heard, all as in a dream. It seemed to 
her as if she were already dead; only the pain was alive in her, 
the horrible sickening pain that would never be stilled, but only 
grow sharper and deeper with each succeeding hour. 

She sat through the banquet, and felt all eyes upon her, and 
was indifferent. Let them stare as they would, as they would 
stare at the sold slave-girl. 

“She has too much self-possession for such a child,” said the 
women there, and they thought that Sergius Zouroff would not 
find in her the young saint that he fancied he had won. 

Her beauty was only greater for her extreme pallor and the 
darkness beneath her eyes. But it was no longer the beauty of 
an innocent, unconscious child; it was that of a woman. 

Now and then she glanced at her mother, at that pretty co- 
quettish little figure, semi-nude, as fashion allowed, and with 
diamonds sparkling everywhere on her snow-white skin; with a 
perpetual laugh on cherubic lips, and gayety and grace in each 
movement. And whenever she glanced there, a somber scorn- 
ful fire came into her own gaze, an unutterable contempt and 
disgust watched wearily from the fair windows of her soul. 

She was thinking to herselt, as she looked, Honor thy father 
and thy mother. That was the old law! Were there such women 
then as she was now? Or was that law, too, a dead letter, as the 
Marriage Sacrament was? 

“ She is exquisitely lovely,” said the great personage in whose 
honor the banquet and the ball were being given. “ In a year of 
two there will be nothing so beautiful as she will be in all 
Europe. But — is she well? — is she happy? Forgive the ques- 
tion.” 

“ Oh, sir, she is but made nervous by the honor of your praise,” 
said her mother, who was the person addressed. “Your Royal 
Highness is too kind to think of her health: it is perfect; indeed, 
I may say, without exaggeration, that neither morally nor 
physically has my sweet child given me one hour’s anxiety since 
her birth. ” 

The prince bowed, and said some pleasant, gracious words; but 
his conviction remained unchanged by Lady Dolly’s assurance of 
her daughter’s peace and joy. 

Vere was led out by Prince Zouroff to join the Quadrille d’Hcaar 
neur. 


MOTHS. 105 

u This is the Iron Cross!” she thought, and a faint, bitter smile 
parted her lips. 

She never once lifted her eyes to meet his. 

“ Cannot you tell me you are happy, mon enfant?” he mur- 
mured once. She did not look at him, and her lips scarcely 
moved as she answered him. 

“I obey my mother, monsieur. Do not ask more.” 

Zouroff was silent. The dusky red of his face grew paler; he 
felt a momentary instinct to tear his pearls off her and bid her be 
free; then the personal loveliness of her awoke too fiercely that 
mere appetite which is all that most men and many women 
know of love, and his hands clinched close on hers in the slow 
figure of the dance. 

A stronger admiration than he had ever felt for her rose in 
him, too. He knew the bitterness and the revolt that were in 
her, yet he saw her serene, cold, mistress of herself. It was not 
the childlike simplicity that he had once fancied that he loved 
her for, but it was a courage he respected, a quality he under- 
stood. “ One might send her to Siberia and she would change to 
ice; she would not bend,” he thought; and the thought whetted 
his passion to new fierceness and tenacity. 

The ball was gorgeous; the surprises were brilliant and novel; 
the gardens were illumined to the edge of the sea till the fishers 
out in the starry night thought the shore was all on fire. The 
great person in whose honor it was was gratified and amused; 
the grace and grandeur of the scene were like old days of Ver- 
sailles or of Venice. 

The child moved amidst it, with the great pearls lying on her 
throat and encircling her arms, and her eyes had a blind uncon- 
scious look in them like those of eyes that have recently lost 
their sight and are not yet used to the eternal darkness. 

But she spoke simply and well, if seldom; she moved with cor- 
rect grace in the square dance; she made her perfect courtesy 
with the eighteenth century stateliness in it: all men looked, and 
wondered, and praised her, and women said, with a sigh of envy, 
“ Only sixteen!” 

Only sixteen; and she might have said, as the young emperor 
said when he took his crown, O, my youth, O, my youth! fare- 
well!” 

Once her mother had the imprudence to speak to her ; she 
whispered in her ear: 

“Are you not rewarded, love? Are you not content?” 

Vere looked at her. 

“ I have paid your debt. Be satisfied.” 

A great terror passed, like a cold wind, over the little, selfish, 
cruel, foolish woman, and she trembled. 

The next morning a message came to her from her old North- 
umbrian home: 

“My house must always be open for my dead son’s child, and 
my protection, such as it is, will always be hers.” 

It was signed Sarah Mull and Cantire. 

Vere read it, sitting before her glass in the light of the full day, 
Whilst her women undid the long ropes of pearls that were twisted 


106 


MOTHS . 


about her fair hair. Two great slow tears ran down her cheeks 
and fell on the rough paper of the telegram. 

“ She loves me!” she thought, “ and what a foolish, fickle, sin- 
ning creature I shall forever seem to her!” 

Then, lest with a moment's longer thought her firmness should 
fail her, she wrote back in answer: 

“You are so good, and I am grateful. But I see that it 
is best that I should marry as my mother wished. Fray 
for me.” 

The message winged its way, fleeter than a 'bird, over the gray 
sea to where the northern ocean beat the black Northumbrian 
rocks; and an old woman’s heart was broken with the last pang 
of a sad old age. 

A day or two later the house-party of Felicite broke up, and 
the chateau by the Norman sea was left to its usual solitude. 
Lady Stoat went to stay with her daughter, the Lady Birkenhead, 
who was at Biarritz, and would go thence to half a dozen great 
French and English houses. Prince Zouroff and his sister went 
to Tsarsko-Selo, as it was necessary for him to see his emperor, 
and Lady Dolly took her daughter straight to Paris. 

Paris, in the commencement of autumn was a desert, but 
she had a pretty apartment in the Avenue Josephine. The 
marriage was fixed to take place in November, and two months 
were not too much for all the preparations which she needed 
to make. Besides, Lady Dolly preferred that her daughter 
/.should see as few persons as possible. What was she afraid 
Of? She scarcely knew. She was vaguely afraid of everything. 
She was so used to breaking her word, that a child’s promise 
seemed to her a thing as slight as a spider’s gossamer shining in 
the dew. 

It was safest, she fancied, for Yere to see no one, and to a 
member of the great world there is no solitude so complete as 
a city out of its season. So she has shut Yere in her gilded 
and silvered and over- decorated and over-filled rooms in the 
Avenue Josephine, and kept her there stifled and weary, like a 
woodland bird hung in a cage in a boudoir, and never let the girl 
take a breath of air save by her side in her victoria out in the 
Bois in the still, close evenings. Yere made no opposition to any- 
thing. When St. Agnes gave her young body and her fair soul 
up to torment, did she think of the shape of the executioner’s 
sword? 

Lady Dolly was at this time much worried, too, about her own 
immediate affairs. Jura was gone to India on a hunting and 
shooting tour with two officers of his old regiment, and he had 
written very briefly to say so to her, not mentioning any period for 
his return. He meant to break it all off, thought Lady Dolly, 
with an irritated humiliation rankling in her. Two years before 
she would have been Didome infuriata ; but time tempers every- 
thing, and there were always consolations. The young dandy who 
had won the Grand Prix was devoted and amusing; it could not 
be said that Jura had been either of late. She had got used to 
him, and she had not felt it necessary to be always en beaut e 
for him, which was convenient. Besides, there were heaps of 


MOTHS. 


107 


things he had got into the way of doing for her, and he knew all 
her habits and tastes ; losing him was like losing a careful and 
familiar servant. Still, she was not inconsolable. He had grown 
boorish and stupid in the last few months; and, though he 
knew thousands of her secrets, he was a gentleman ; they 
were safe with him, as safe as the letters she had written him. 

But her vanity was wounded. 

“ Just because of that child’s great gray eyes !” she thought, 
angrily. 

Classic Clytemnestra, when murdered by her son, makes a 
grander figure, certainly, but she is not, perhaps, more deeply 
wounded, than fashionable Faustina when eclipsed by her 
daughter. 

“You look quite worn, poor pussy !’ ; said Lady Stoat, ten- 
derly, as she met her one day in Paris, “when you ought to ba 
so pleased and so proud !” 

Lady Stoat, who was very ingenious and very penetrating, left 
no means untried by which to fathom the reasons of the sudden 
change of Vere. Lady Stoat read characters too well not to 
know that neither caprice nor malleability was the cause of it. 

“ She has been coerced; but how?” she thought; and brought 
her microscope of delicate investigation and shrewd observa- 
tion to bear upon the subject. But she could make nothing 
of it. 

“I do what my mother wishes,” Yere answered her, and 
answered her nothing more. 

“If you keep your secrets as well when you are married.’ 1 
thought Lady Stoat, “you will be no little trouble to you* 
husband, my dear.” 

Aloud, of course, she said only: 

“ So right, darling, so very right. Your dear little mother has 
had a great deal of worry in her life; it is only just that she 
should find full compensation in you. And I am quite sure you 
will be happy, Yere. You are so clever and serious; you will 
have a salon , I dare say, and get all the politicians about you. 
That will suit you better than frivolity, and give you an aim in 
society. Without an aim, love, society is sadly like playing cards 
for counters. One wants a lover to meet, a daughter to chape- 
rone, a cause to advance, a something besides the mere pleasure 
of showing oneself. You will never have the lover, I am sure, 
and you cannot have the daughter just yet ; so, if I were you, I 
would take the cause — it does not matter what cause in the least 
—say England against Russia, or Russia against England; but 
throw yourself into it, and it will amuse you, and it will be a 
safeguard to you from the dangers that beset every beautiful 
young wife in the world. It is a melancholy thing to confess, 
and a humiliating one, but all human beings are so made that 
they never can go on playing only for counters!” 

And Lady Stoat, smiling her sweetest, went away from Yere 
with more respect than she had ever felt before for feather- 
headed little pussy, since pussy had been able to do a clevei 
tiling unaided, and had a secret that her friend did not know. 

“Foolish pussy!” thought her friend Adine. “ Oh, foolish 


108 


MOTHS. 


pussy, to have a secret from me! And it takes such a wise head 
and such a long head to have a secret! It is as dangerous as a 
packet of dynamite to most persons.” 

Aloud to Lady Dolly she said only — 

“ So glad, dear love, oh so glad! I was quite sure with a little 
reflection the dear child would see the wisdom of the step we 
wished her to take. It is such an anxiety off your mind: a girl 
with you in the season would have harassed you terribly. Really 
I do not know which is the more wearing — an heiress that one is 
afraid every moment will be got at by some spendthrift, or a 
dear little penniless creature that one is afraid will never marry 
at all; and, with Yere’s peculiar manners and notions, it might 
have been very difficult. Happily, Zouroff has only admired her 
lovely classic head, and has never troubled himself about what 
is inside it. I think she will be an astonishment to him — rather. 
But, to be sure, after six months in the world, she will change, 
as they all do.” 

“ Yere will never change,” said Lady Dolly, irritably, and with 
a confused guilty little glance at her friend. “ Vere will be al- 
ways half an angel and half an imbecile as long as ever she 
lives.” 

“ Imbeciles are popular people,” said Lady Stoat, with a 
smile. “ As for angels, no one cares for them much about 
modern houses, except in terra cotta.” 

‘‘It is not you who should say so,” returned Lady Dolly, ten- 
derly. 

“Oh, my dear,” answered her friend, with a modest sigh of 
depreciation, “ I have no pretensions; I am only a poor, weak, 
and very imperfect creature. But one thing I may really say of 
myself, and that is, that I honestly love young girls and do my 
best for them; and I think not a few have owed their life’s hap- 
piness to me. May your Yere be of the number!” 

“ I don’t think she will ever be happy,” said Ladv Dolly, im- 
patiently, with a little confused look of guilt. She doesn’t care 
a bit about dress.” 

“That’s a terrible lacune, certainly,” assented Lady Stoat, 
with a smile. “ Perhaps, instead, she will take to politics — those 
serious girls often do,— or perhaps she will care about her chil- 
dren.” 

Lady Dolly gave a little shudder. What was her daughter but 
a child? It seemed only the other day that the little, fair baby 
had tumbled about among the daisies on the vicarage lawn, and 
poor dead Yere in his mellow gentle voice had recited, as he 
looked at her, the glorious lines to his child of Coleridge. *How 
wretched she had been then! — how impatient of the straitened 
means, the narrow purse, the country home, the calm religious 
life! How wretched she would have been now could she have 
gone back to it! Yet, with the contradiction of her sex and 
character, Lady Dolly for a moment wished with all her soul 
that she had never left that narrow home, and that the child 
were now among the daisies. 

One day, when they were driving down the Avenue Marigny, 
her mother pointed out to Yere a row of lofty windows an pre* 


MOTHS. 


*109 


niter y with their shutters shut, but with gorgeous autumn flowers 
hanging over their gilded balconies; the liveried Suisse was yawn- 
ing in the doorway. 

“ That is where your Faust-Romeo lives,” said Lady Dolly, 
who could never bring herself to remember the proverb, “Let 
sleeping dogs lie.” “It is full of all kinds of beautiful things, 
and queer ancient things too; he is a connoisseur in his way, and 
everybody gives him such wonderful presents. He is making 
terrible scandal just now with the young grand duchess. Only 
to think of what you risked that day boating with him makes 
one shudder! You might have been compromised for life!” 

Vere’s proud mouth grew very scornful, but she made no reply. 

Her mother looked at her and saw the scorn. 

“ Oh, you don’t believe me?” she said, irritably. “ Ask any- 
body! an hour or two alone with a man like that ruins a girl’s 
name forever. Of course it was morning, and open air, but still 
Correze is one of those persons a woman can’t be seen with, even!” 

Yere turned her head and looked back at the bright balconies 
with their hanging flowers; then she said, with her teeth shut 
and her lips turning white: 

“ I do not speak to you of Prince Zouroff’s character. Will 
you be so good as not to speak to me of that of M. Correze?” 

Her mother was startled and subdued. She wished she had 
not woke the sleeping dog. 

“If she be like that at sixteen, what will she be at six- and- 
twenty?” she thought. “ She puts them in opposition already!” 

Nevertheless, she never again felt safe, and whenever she 
drove along the Avenue Marigny she looked up at the house with 
the gilded balconies and hanging flowers to make sure that it 
gave no sign of life. 

It did not occur to her that whatever Yere might be at six- 
and-twenty would be the result of her own teaching, actions, and. 
example. Lady Dolly had reasoned with herself that she had 
done right after all: she had secured a magnificent position for 
her daughter, was it not the first duty of a mother? 

If Yere could not be content with that position, and all its 
compensations, if she offended Heaven and the world by any ob- 
stinate passions or imprudent guilt, if she, in a word, with vir- 
tue made so easy and so gilded, should not after all be virtuous, 
it would be the fault of Bulmer, the fault of society, the fault of 
Zouroff, the fault of Correze, or of some other man, perhaps— 
never the fault of her mother. 

When gardeners plant and graft, they know very well what 
will be the issue of their work; they do not expect the rose from 
a bulb of garlic, or look for the fragrant olive from a slip of 
brier; but the culturers of human nature are less wise, and they 
sow poison and rave in reproaches, when it breeds and brings 
forths its like. “The rosebud garden of girls ” is a favorite 
theme for poets, and the maiden, in her likeness to a half-opened 
blossom, is as near purity and sweetness as a human creature 
6an be; yet what does the world do with its opening buds?— it 
thrusts them in the forcing honne amidst the ordure, and then, 


110 


MOTHS. 


if they perish prematurely, never blames itself. The streets 
absorb the girls of the poor, society absorbs the daughters of the 
rich; and not seldom one form of prostitution, like the other, 
keeps its captives “bound in the dungeon of their own corruption ” 


CHAPTER XI. 

It was snowing in Vienma. Snow lay heavy on all the plains 
and roads around, and the Danube was freezing fast. 

“It will be barely colder in Moscow,” said Correze, with a 
shiver, as he threw his furs about him and left the opera-house 
amidst the frantic cheers and adoring outcries of the crowd with- 
out, after his last appearance in Romeo e Guilietta. In the bitter, 
glittering frosty night a rain of hothouse flowers fell about him; 
he hated to see them fall; but his worshipers did not know that, 
and would not have heeded it if they had. Roses and violets, 
hyacinth and white lilac, fell about his feet, lined his path, and 
carpeted his carriage as if it were April in the south, instead of 
November in Austria. 

His hand had just been pressed by an emperor’s, a ring of bril- 
liants beyond price had just been slid on his finger by an empress; 
the haughtiest aristocracy of the world had caressed him and 
flattered him and courted him ; he w r as at the supreme hight of 
fame, and influence, and fashion, and genius: yet, as he felt the 
roses and the lilies fall about him, he said restlessly to himself: 

“ When I am old and nobody heeds me, I shall look back to 
this night, and such nights as this, as to a lost Heaven; why, in 
Heaven’s name, cannot I enjoy it now?” 

But enjoyment is not to be gained by reflecting that to enjoy 
is our duty, and neither the diamonds nor the roses did he care 
for, nor did he care for the cheers of the multitude that stood 
out under the chill brilliant skies for the chance of seeing him 
pass down the streets. It is a rare and splendid royalty, too, 
that of a great singer; but he did not care for its crowns. The 
roses made him think of a little hedge-rose gathered by a sweet- 
brier bush on a cliff by a gray, quiet sea. 

'With such odd caprices does fate often smite genius. 

He drove to the supper-table of a very great lady, beautiful as 
the morning; and he was the idol of the festivity which was in 
his honor; and the sweet eyes of its mistress told him that no 
audacity on his part would be deemed presumption; yet it all 
left him careless and almost cold. She had learned Juliet’s part 
by heart, but he had forgotten Romeo’s — had left it behind bin? 
in the opera-house with his old Venetian velvets and lace. 

From that great lady’s, whom he left alone with a chill heart, 
empty and aching, he went with his comrades to the ball of the 
Elysium down in the subterranean vaults of the city, where 
again and again in many winters he had found contagion in the 
elastic mirth and the buoyant spirit of the clean-limbed, bright- 
eyed children of the populaoe, cfancing and whirling and leaping 
far down under the streets to the Styrian music. But it did not 
amuse him this night; nor did the dancers tempt him; the whir! 


MOTHS. 41 

and the glow and the noise and the mirth seemed to him tedious 
and stupid. 

“ Decidedly that opera tires me,” he said to himslf, and 
thought that his weariness came from slaying Tybalt 
and himself on the boards of the great theater. He told his 
friends and adorers with petulance to let him be still, he wanted 
to sleep, and the dawn was very cold. He went home to his gor- 
geous rooms in a gorgeous hotel, and lit his cigar and felt tired. 
The chambers were strewn with bouquets, wreaths, presents, 
notes; and amidst the litter was a great gold vase, a fresh gift 
from the emperor, with its two rileivi, telling the two stories of 
Orpheus and of Amphion. 

But Correze did not look twice at it. He looked instead at a 
French journal, which he had thrown on his chair when his 
servant had roused him at seven that evening, saying that it was 
the hour to drive to the theater. He had crushed the paper in 
his hand then and thrown it down; he took it up now, and look- 
ed again in a corner of it in which there was announced the ap- 
proaching marriage of Prince Zouroff. 

“ To give her to that brute!” he murmured, as he read it over 
once more. “ Mothers were better and kinder in the days of 
Moloch!” 

Then he crushed the journal up again, and flung it into the 
wood-fire burning in the gilded tower of the stove. 

It was not slaying Tybalt that had tired him that night. 

“What is the child to me?” he said to himself, as he threw 
himself on his bed. “ She never could have been anything, and 
yet ” 

Yet the scent of the hothouse bouquets and the forced flowers 
seemed sickly 'to him; he remembered the smell of the little rose 
plucked from the sweet-brier hedge on the cliff above the sea. 

The following noon he left Vienna for Moscow, where he had 
an engagement for twenty nights previous to his engagement at 
St. Petersburg for the first week of the Russian New Year. 

From Moscow he wrote to Lady Dolly. When the letter 
reached Lady Dolly it made her cry; it gave her a crise des nerfs. 
When she read what he wrote she turned pale and shuddered a 
little; but she burnt what he wrote; that was all. 

She shivered a little whenever she thought of that letter for 
days and weeks afterward; but it changed her purpose in no 
way, and she never for one moment thought of acting upon it. 

“ I shall not answer him,” she said to herself. “ He will think 
I have never had it, and I shall send him a faire part like any- 
body else. He will say nothing when the marriage is over. 
Absurd as it is, Correze is a gentleman; I suppose that comes 
from his living so much among us.” 

Among the many gifts that were sent to swell the magnificence 
of the Zouroff bridal, there was one that came anonymously, 
and of which no one know the donor. It gave rise to many 
conjectures and much comment, for there was not even the 
name of the jeweler that had made it. It was an opai necklace 
of exquisite workmanship and great value, and, as its medallion, 
$here hung a single rose diamond cut as a star; beneath the star 


112 


MOTHS. 


was a moth of sapphire and pearls, and beneath the moth was a 
flame of rubies. They were so hung that the moth now touched 
the star, now sank to the flame. It needed no words with it for 
Vere to know whence it came. 

But she kept silence: 

“A strange jewel,” said Prince Zouroff, and his face grew 
dark: he thought some meaning or some memory came with it. 

It was the only gift amidst them all that felt the kisses and 
tears of Yere. 

“I must sink to the flame!” she thought, “and he will nevei; 
know that the fault is not mine; he will never know that I have 
not forgotten the star!” 

But she only wept in secret. 

All her life henceforth was to be one of silence and repression. 
They are the sepolte vive in which society immures its martyrs. 

Some grow fro like their prison- walls and to prefer them to light 
and freedom: others loath them in anguish till death come. 

The gift of that strange medallion annoyed Zouroff, because it 
perplexed him. He never spoke to Vere concerning it, for he 
believed that no woman ever told the truth; but he tried to dis- 
cover the donor by means of his many servants and agents. He 
failed, not because Correze had taken any especial means to in- 
sure secresy, but from simple accident. 

Correze had bought the stones himself of a Persian merchant 
many years before, had drawn the design himself, and had given 
it to a young worker in gems of Galicia whom he had once be- 
friended at the fair of Novgorod; and the work was only com- 
plete in all its beauty and sent to him when the Galician died of 
that terrible form of typhus which is like a plague in Russia. 
Therefore Zouroff s inquiries in Paris were all futile, and he 
gradually ceased to think about the jewel. 

Another thing came to her at that time that hurt her, as the 
knife hurt Iphigenia. It was when the crabbed, clear hand- 
writing she knew so well brought her from Bulmer Chase a bit- 
ter letter. 

“You are your mother’s child, I see,” wrote the harsh old 
woman, who had yet loved her so tenderly. “ You are foolish, 
and fickle, and vain, and won over to the world, like her. You 
have nothing of my dead boy in you, or you would not sell your- 
self to the first rich man that asks. Do not write to me; do not 
expect to hear from me; you aie for me as if you had never 
lived, and if, in your miserable marriage, you ever come to lose 
name and fame — as you may do, for loveless marriages are an 
affront to heaven, and mostly end in further sin — remember that 
you ask nothing at my hands. At your cry I was ready to open 
my hand to you and my heart, but I will never do so now, let 
you want it as you may. I pity you, and I despise you; for 
when you give yourself to a man whom you cannot honor or 
love, you are no better than the shameless women that a few 
weeks ago I would no more have named to you than I would 
have struck you a buffet on your cheek.” 

Vere read the letter with the hot brazen glow of the Paris sun 
striking through the rose silk of the blinds upon her, and each 


MOTHS. 113 

word stood out before her as if it were on fire, and her cheek grew 
scarlet as if the blow were struck on it. 

“She is right! Oh, how right!” she thought, in a sort of 
agony. “ And I cannot tell her the truth! I must never tell her 
the truth!” 

Sin and shame, and all the horror of base passions, had 
been things as unintelligible to her, as unknown, as the vile, 
miserable, frail women that a few roods off her in this city 
were raving and yelling in the wards of Sainte-Pelagie. And 
now, all in a moment, they seemed to have entered her life, te 
swarm about her, to become part and parcel of her — and from no 
fault of hers. 

“Oh, mother, spare me! Let me take back my word!” she 
cried, unconsciously, as she started to her feet with a stab of 
awful pain in her heart that frightened her; it felt like death. 

But in the rose-bright room all around her was silence. 

Her grandmother’s letter lay at her feet, and a ray of the sun 
shone on the words that compared her to the hapless creatures 
whose very shame she even yet did not comprehend. 

The door unclosed, and Lady Dolly came in; very voluble, in- 
different to suffering or humiliation, not believing, mdeed, that 
she ever caused either. 

Living with her daughter, and finding thit no reproach or 
recrimination escaped Vere against her, Lady Dolly had begun 
to grow herself again. She was at times very nervous with 
Vere, and never, if she could help it, met her eyes, but she 
»vas successful, she was contented, she was triumphant, and 
the sense of shame that haunted her was thrust far into the 
background. All the vulgar triumphs of the alliance were 
sweet to her, and she did her best to forget its heavy cost. 
Women of her caliber soon forget; the only effort they have 
ever to make is, on the contrary, to remember. Lady Dolly 
had earnestly tried to forget, and had almost thoroughly suc- 
ceeded. 

She came now into the room, a pretty pearl-gray figure, fresh 
from lengthened and close council with famous tailors. 

“Vera, my sweet Vera, your sables are come; such sables! 
Nobody’s except the grand-duchesses’ will equal them. And he 
has sent bags of turquoise with them, literally sacks, as if they 
were oats or green peas! You will have all your toilette-things 
set with them, and your inkstands, and all that, won’t you? And 
they are very pretty, you know, set flat, very thick, in broad 
bands, very broad bands for the waist and the throat; but myself, 

I prefer Who’s been writing to you? Oh, the old woman 

from Bulmer. I suppose she is very angry, and writes a great 
deal of nonsense. She was always horrid. The only thing she 
gave me when I married poor Vere was a black Bible. I wonder 
what she will send to you? Another black Bible, perhaps. I 
believe she gets Bibles cheap because she subscribes to the men 
that go out to read Leviticus and Deuteronomy to the negro 
babies !” 

Vere bent and raised the letter in silence. The burning color 
had gone from her cheeks; she tore the letter up into «aany 


MOTHS. 


m 

email pieces and let them float out into the golden dust of the 
sunlight of Paris. Her word had been given, and she was its slave. 

She looked at her mother, whom she had never called mother 
since that last night at the chateau of Abbaye aux Bais. 

“Will you, if you please, spare me all those details?” she said, 
simply. “ Arrange everything as you like best, it will satisfy 
me. But let me hear nothing about it, That is all.” 

“You strange, dear creature! Any other girl ” began 

Lady Dolly, with a smile that was distorted, and eyes that looked 
away. 

“ I am not as other girls are. I hope there is no other girl in 
all the world like me.” 

Her mother made no answer. 

Through the stillness of the chambers there came the sounds 
of Paris, the vague, confused, loud murmur of traffic and music, 
and pleasure and pain — the sounds of the world, the world to 
which Yere was sold. 

The words of the old recluse of Bulmer were very severe, but 
they were very true, and it was because of their truth that they 
seared the delicate nerves of the girl like a hot iron. She did not 
well know what-skame was, but she felt that her own marriage 
was shame; and as she rolled home from the Bois that night 
through the bright streets of Paris, past the hotel in the Avenue 
de I’Imperatrice, that was to be her prison-house, she looked at 
the girls of the populace who were hurrying homeward from 
their workshops — flower-makers, glove-makers, clear-starchers, 
teachers of children, workers in factories — and she envied them, 
and followed them in fancy to their humble homes, and thought 
to herself, “How happy I would be to work, if only I had a 
mother that loved me, a mother that was honest and good!” 

The very touch of her mother’s hand, the very sound of her 
laugh and sight of her smile, hurt her; she had known nothing 
about the follies and vices of the world, until suddenly, in one 
moment, she had seen them all incarnated hi her mother, whose 
pretty graces and gayeties became terrible ;o her forever, as the 
pink and white loveliness of a woman beco ues to the eyes that 
have seen in its veiled brefist a cancer. 

Vere had seen the moral cancer. And sh } could not forget it, 
never could she forget it. 

“ When she was once beloved by my father !” she thought; 

and she let her Bible lie unopened, lest, turning its leaves, she 
should see the old divine imprecations, the old bitter laws, that 
were in it against such women as this woman, her mother, was. 

One day in November her bethrothed husband arrived from 
Russia. The magnificence of his gifts to her was the theme of 
Paris. The girl was passive and silent always. 

When he kissed her hands only she trembled from head to 
foot. 

“Are you afraid of me?” he murmured. 

“ No; I am not afraid.” 

She could not tell him that she felt disgust — disgust so great, 
so terrible, she could have sprung from the balcony and dashed 
herself to death upon the stones. 


MOTHS. 


115 


“ Cannot you say that you like me ever so little now?” he per- 
sisted, thinking that all his generosity might have borne some 
fruit. 

“ No, I cannot.” 

He laughed grimly and bitterly. 

. “ yeti dare take you, even as you are, you beautiful, cold 
child!” 

“ I cannot tell you a falsehood.” 

“Will you never tell me one?” 

. “No; never.” 

“ I do not believe you; every woman lies.” 

Vere did not answer in words, but her eyes shone for a mo- 
ment with a scorn so noble that Sergius Zouroff bent his head 
before her. 

“ I beg your pardon,” he said: “ I think you will not lie. But 
then you are not a maiden only; you are a young saint.” 

Vere stood aloof from him. The sunshine shone on her fair 
head, and the long, straight folds of her white dress; her hands 
were clasped in front of her, and the sadness in her face gave it 
greater gravity aDd beauty. 

“I am a beast to hold her to her word!” he thought; but the 
beast in him was stronger than aught else, and conquered him, 
and made him ruthless to her. 

She was looking away from him into the blue sky. She was 
thinking of the words, “keep yourself unspotted from the world.” 
She was thinking that she would be always true to this man 
whom she loathed — always true; that was his right. 

“And perhaps God will let me die soon,” she thought, with 
her childish fancy that God was near and Death an angel. 

Sergius Zouroff looked at her, hesitated, bowed low, and left 
the room. 

“ I am not fit for her; no fitter than the sewer of the street for 
a pearl!” he thought; and he felt ashamed. 

Yet he w T ent to his usual companions, and spent the night in 
drink and play, and saw the sun rise with hot, red eyes; he could 
not change because she was a saint. 

Only a generation or two back his forefathers had bought beau- 
tiful Persian women by heaping up the scales of barter with 
strings of pearls and sequins, and had borne off Circassian slaves 
in forays with simple payment of a lance left in the lifeless breasts 
of the men who had owned them; his wooing was of the same 
rude sort. Only, being a man of the world, and his ravishing 
being legalized by society, he went to the great shops of Paris for 
his gems, and employed great notaries to write down the terms 
of barter. 

The shrinking coldness, the undisguised aversion, of his be- 
trothed, only whetted his passion to quicker ardor, as the shrieks 
of the Circassian captives or the quivering limbs of the Persian 
slaves had done that of his forefathers in Ukraine; and besides, 
after all, he thought, she had chosen to give herself, hating him, 
for the sake of what he was and of all he could bestow. After 
all, her mother could not have driven her so far unless ambition 
had made her in a manner malleable. 


116 


MO'ms 


Zouroff, in whose mind all women were alike, had almost been 
brought to believe in the honesty and steadfastness of the girl to 
whom he had given Loris, and he was at times disposed to be 
bitterly enraged against her because she had fallen in his sight by 
her abrupt submission; she seemed at heart no better than the 
rest. She abhorred him, yet she accepted him. No mere obedience 
could account for that acceptance without some weakness or some 
cupidity of nature. It hardened him against her; it spoilt her 
lovely, pure childhood in his eyes; it made her shudder from him 
seem half hypocrisy. After all, he said to him self, where was she 
so very much higher than Casse-une-Croute? It was only the 
price that was altered. 

When she came to know what Casse-une-Croute was, she said 
the same thing to herself. 

“ Do you believe in wicked people, miladi?” he said, the next 
evening, to Lady Dolly, as they sat together at the Fantaisies- 
Parisiennes. 

“ Wicked people? Oh, dear, no — at least— yes,” said Lady 
Dolly, vaguely. “ Yes, I suppose I do. I am afraid one must. 
One sees dreadful things in the papers; in society everybody is 
very much like everybody else — no?” 

Zouroff laughed — the little, short, hard laugh that was char- 
acteristic of him. 

4 ‘ I think one need not go to the papers. I think you and I are 
both doing evil enough to satisfy the devil — if a devil there 
be. But, if you do not mind it, I need not.” 

Lady Dolly was startled, then smiled. 

“ Vvdiat droll things you say! And do not talk so of the . 

It doesn’t sound well. It’s an old-fashioned belief, I know, and 
not probable, they say now, but still — one never can tell ” 

And Lady Dolly, quite satisfied with herself, laughed her last 
laugh at the fun of the Belle Helene , and had her cloak folded 
round her, and went out on the arm of her future son-in-law. 

Such few great ladies as were already in Paris, passing through 
from the Channel coast to the Riviera, or from one chateau to 
another, all envied her, she knew; and if anybody had ever said 
anything that was — that was not quite nice — nobody could say 
anything now when another fortnight her daughter would be 
Princesss Zouroff. 

“Really, I never fancied at all I was clever, but I begin to 
think that I am,” she said in her self-complacency to herself. 

The idea that she could be wicked seemed quite preposterous to 
her when she thought it over. “Harmless little me!” she said 
to herself. True, she had felt wicked when she had met her 
daughter’s eye, but that was nonsense; the qualm had always 
gone away when she had taken her champagne at dinner or her 
ether in her bedroom. 

A fortnight later, the marriage of the head of the house of 
Zouroff was solemnized at the chapel of the English Embassy 
and the Russian church at Paris. 

“ So they have thrown an English maiden to our Tartar mino* 
taur! Oh ? whati chaste people they are, those English!” said a 


M cuiitf# 117 

Russian Colonel of tti© Guard f6 Cbrreze, as tlteir sledge flew 
over the snow on the Newski Prospect. 

Correze gave a shudder of disgust; he said nothing. 

Critics in music at the opera-house that night declared then, 
and long after, that for the first time in all his career he was 
guilty of more than one artistic error as he sang in the great part 
, of John of Leyden. 

When the opera was over, and he sat at a supper, in a room 
filled with hot-house flowers and lovely ladies, while the breath 
froze on the beards of the sentinels on guard in the white, still 
night without, Correze heard little of the laughter, saw little 
of the beauty, round him. He was thinking all the while 

“The heaviest sorrow of my life will always be, not to have 
saved that child from her mother.” 


CHAPTER XII. 

Between the Gulf of Villafranca and that of Eza there was a 
white, shining, sunlit house, with gardens that were, in the 
dreariest month of the year, rich and red with roses, golden with 
oranve fruit, and made stately by palms of long growth, 
through whose stems the blue sea shone. To these gardens 
there was a long terrace of white marble stretching along the 
edge of the cliff, with the waves beating far down below; to the 
terrace there were marble seats and marble steps, and copies of 
the Loves and Fauns of the Vatican and of the Capitol, with the 
glow of geraniums flame-like about their feet. 

Up and down the length of this stately place a woman moved 
with a step that was slow and weary, and yet very restless — the 
step of a thing that is chained. The woman was very young, 
and very pale; her skirts of olive velvet swept the white stone; 
her fair hair was coiled loosely with a golden arrow run through 
it; round her throat there were strings of pearls, the jewels of 
morning. All women envied her the riches of which those 
pearls were the emblem. She was Vera, Princess Zouroff. 

Vera always, now. 

She moved up and down, up and down, fatiguing herself, and 
unconscious of fatigue; the sunny world was quiet about her; 
the greyhound paced beside her, keeping step with hers. She 
was alone, and there was no one to look upon her face and see its 
pain, its weariness, its disgust. 

Only a week ago, she thought; only a week since she had fallen 
in a swoon at the altar of the Russian church; only a week since 
she had been the girl Vere Herbert. Only a week !— and it seemed 
to her that thousands of years had come and gone, parting her 
by ages fr#m that old sweet season of ignorance, of innocence, 
of peace, of youth. 

She was only sixteen still, but she was no more young. Her 
girlhood had been killed in her, as a spring blossom is crushed by 
a rough, hot hand that, meaning to caress it, kills it. 

A great disgust filled her, and seemed to suffocate her with its 
loathing and its shame. Everything else in her seemed dead, 
*ixcept that one bitter sense of intolerable revulsion* All the re* 


718 


MOTHS. 


volted pride in her was like a living thing buried under a weight 
of sand, and speechless, but aghast and burning. 

“ How could she — how could she?” she thought, every hour of 
the day; and the crime of her mother against her seemed the 
vilest the earth could hold. 

She herself had not known what she had done when she had 
consented to give herself in marriage, but her mother had 
known. 

She did not reason now. She only felt. 

An unutterable depression and repugnance weighed on her 
always; she felt ashamed of the sun when it rose, of her own 
eyes when they looked at her from the mirror. To herself she 
seemed fallen so low, sunk to such deep degradation, that the 
basest of creatures would have had full right to strike her cheek, 
and spit in her face, and call her sister. 

Poets in all time have poured out their pity on the woman who 
wakes to a loveless dishonor; what can the few words of a priest, 
or the envy of a world, do to lighten that shame to sacrificed 
innocence! — Nothing. 

Her life had changed as suddenly as a flower changes when 
the hot sirocco blows over it and fills it with sand instead of 
dew. Nothing could help her. Nothing could undo what had 
been done. Nothing could make her ever more the clear-eyed, 
fair-souled child that had not even known the meaning of any 
shame. 

“God himself could not help me!” she thought, with a bitter- 
ness of resignation that was more hopeless than that of the mar- 
tyrs of old; and she paced up and down the marble road of the 
terrace, wondering how long her life would last like this. 

All the magnificence that surrounded her was hateful; all the 
gifts that were heaped upon her were like insult; all the congrat- 
ulations that were poured out on her were like the mockeries of 
apes, like the crackling of dead leaves. In her own sight, and 
without sin of her own, she had become vile. 

And it was only a week ago! 

Society would have laughed. 

Society had set its seal of approval upon this union, and upon 
all such unions, and so deemed them sanctified. Year after year, 
one on another, the pretty, rosy, golden-curled daughters of fair 
mothers were carefully tended and cultured and reared up to 
grace the proud races from which they sprung, and were brought 
out into the great world with their first bloom on them like half- 
opened roses, with no other end or aim set before them as the one 
ambition of their lives than to make such a marriage as this. 
Whosoever achieved such was blessed. 

Pollution? prostitution? Society would have closed its ears to 
such words, knowing nothing of such things, not choosing to 
know anything. 

Shame? What shame could there be when he was her husband? 
Strange fanciful exaggeration! — society would have stared and 
smiled. 

The grim old woman w r ho studied her Bible on the iron-bound 
Northumbrian shore 0 — the frivolous, dreamy, fantastic singer, 


MOTHS. 


119 


[who had played the part of Romeo till all life seemed to him a 
rose-garden, moonlit and made for serenades — these two might 
(perhaps think with her! and understand this intent revolt, this 
passionate repugnance, this ceaseless sense of unendurable, 
indelible reproach. But those were all. Society would have 
given her no sympathy. Society would have simpered and 
sneered. To marry well — that was the first duty of a woman. 

She had fulfilled it; she had been fortunate, how could she 
fail to be content? 

A heavy step trod the marble steps, and a heavy shadow 
fell across the sunlight; her husband approached her. 

“You are out without any shade; you will spoil your skin,” 
he said, as his eyes fell gloomily on her, for he noticed the 
shudder that passed over her as he drew near. 

She moved without speaking, where no sun fell, where the 
armless Cupid of the Vatican, copied in marble, stood among 
the roses of a hundred leaves. 

“How pale you are! That gown is too heavy for you. Do 
you like this place?” 

“I?” 

She said the word w'ith an unconscious sound in it, that had 
the wonder of despair — despair which asked, what was there 
left in all the world to like or love? 

“Do you like it, I say,” he repeated. “Most women rave 
about it. You seem as if it were a prison-house. Will you be 
always like that?” 

“The place is beautiful,” she said, in a low tone. “Have I 
complained?” 

“No; you never complain. That is what annoys me. If you 
ever fretted like other women — but you are as mute as that 
marble, armless thing. Sometimes you make me afraid — 
afraid — that I shall forget myself, and strike you.” 

She was silent. 

“Would that you did strike sooner than embrace me!” she 
thought; and he read the unuttered thought in her eyes. 

“I do love you,” he said, sullenly, with some emotion. “You 
must know that; I have left no means untried to show it you.” 

“You have been very generous, monsieur!” 

“Monsieur! always monsieur! — it is ridiculous! I am your 
husband, and you must give me some tenderer word than that. 
After all, why cannot you be happy? You have all you want 
or wish for, and if you have a wish still unfulfilled, be it the 
maddest or most impossible, it shall be gratified if gold can do 
it; for I love you, you frozen child!” 

He bent his lips to hers; she shuddered, and was still. 

He kept his hand about her throat, and gathered one of the 
roses of a hundred leaves, and set it against the pearls and 
her white skin; then he flung it into the sea roughly. 

“Roses do not become you; you are not a belle jardiniere; 
you are a statue. This place is dull; one tires of it; we will 
go to Russia. 

“As you please.” 

“As I please! Will you say nothing else all your life? 


120 


MOTHS. 


There is no pleasure in doing what one pleases unless there is 
some opposition to the doing it. If you would say you hated 
snow and ice, now, I would swear to you that snow and ice 
were paradise beside these sickly palms and tawdry flowers. Is 
there nothing you like? Who sent you that strange necklace of 
the moth?” 

“I do not know.” 

“ But you imagine?” 

She was silent. 

“ What is the meaning of it?” 

“ I think the meaning is that one may rise to great ends, oi 
pink to base ones.” 

“ Has it no love-token, then? no message?” 

“No.” 

The red color rose over her pale face, but she looked at him 
with uuflinching gaze. He was but half satisfied. 

“ And do you mean to rise or sink ?” he said, in a tone of 
banter. “ Pray tell me.” 

“I have sunk.” 

The words stung him, and his pride, which was arrogant and 
'vain, smarted under them. 

“ By God !” he said, with his short, hard laugh. “ Did it never 
occur to you, my beautiful Yera, that you would do wiser not to 
insult me if you want to enjoy your life ? I am your master, and 
I can be a bad master.” 

She looked at him without flinching, very coldly, very wearily. 

“ Why will you ask me questions ? The truth displeases you, 
and I will not tell you other than the truth. I meant no insult, 
— unless it were to insult myself.” 

He was silent. He walked to and fro a while, pulling the roses 
from their stems and flinging them into the gulf below. Then 
he spoke abruptly, changing the subject. 

“We will go to Russia. You shall see a ball in the Salle des 
Palmiers. The world is best. Solitude is sweet for lovers, but 
not when one of them is a statue — or an angel. Besides, that 
sort of thing never lasts a week. The world is best. You would 
make me hate you — or adore you — if we stayed on alone; and I 
wish to do neither. If you were not my wife it might be worth 
while; but as it is ” 

He threw another rose into the sea, as if in a metaphor of in- 
difference. 

“ Come to breakfast,” he said, carelessly. “We will leave for 
Russia to-night.” 

As they passed down the terrace and entered the house, she 
moved wearily beside him, with her face averted and her lips 
very pale. 

The Salle des Palmiers had no charm for her. She was think- 
ing of the nightingale that was then singing in the Russian 
snows. 

If she saw Correze. what could she say? The truth she could 
not tell him, and he must be left to think the moth had dropped 
into the earthly fires of venal ambitions and of base desires. 


MOTHS. 121 

# “ Could you not leave me here?” she said, wistfully and a little 
timidly, as she sat at the breakfast- table, 
j. He answered with his curt and caustic laugh. 

“ I thank you for the compliment! No, my dear, one does not 
go through all the weariness and folly of marriage ceremonies to 
leave the loveliness one has purchased so hardly in a week! Have 
patience! I shall be tired of you soon, maybe, but not until you 
have shown your diamonds at an imperial ball. Do not get too 
pale. The court will rally me upon my tyranny. You are too 
pale. A touch of your mother’s rouge will be advisable unless 
you get some color of your own.” 

Vere was silent. 

Her throat seemed to contract and choke her. She set her 
glass down untouched. 

This was her master! — this man, who would tire of her soon, 
and who bade her rouge while she was yet sixteen years old! 

Yet his tyranny was less horrible to her than his tenderness. 

That night they left for Russia. 

A few days later the gossip of St. Petersburg, in court and 
cafe, talked only of two things — the approaching arrival of the 
new beauty, Princess Zouroff, with the opening of the long- 
closed Zouroff Palace on the Newski Prospect, and the immense 
penalty paid in forfeit by the great tenor, Correze, to escape 
the last twenty nights of his engagement in that city. 

“ I had better forfeit half my engagement than lose my voice 
altogether,” said Correze, impatiently, in explanation. “The 
thousands of francs I can soon make again; but if the mechani- 
cal nightingale in my throat give way, I must go and break 
stones for my bread. No: in this atmosphere I can breathe no 
longer. I pay — and I go to the South.” 

He paid and went; and St. Petersburg was half consoled for 
his departure by the entry on the following day of Prince Zou- 
roff, and of her whom all the world called now, and would call 
henceforward, Princess Yera. 


CHAPTER XIII. 

Again in the month of November, exactly one year after her 
marriage, a tall, slender figure, clothed in white, with white furs, 
moved to and fro very wearily under the palms of the Villa 
Nelaguine on the Gulf of Villafranca, and her sister-in-law, 
looking wistfully at her, thought: 

“I hope he is not cruel; I hope not. Perhaps it is only the 
death of the child that has saddened her.” 

Vere read her thoughts and looked her in the eyes. 

“ I am glad that the child died,” she said, simply. 

The Princess Nelaguine shuddered a little. 

“ Oh, my dear,” she murmured, “ that cannot be! Do not say 
that; women find solace in their children when they are unhappy 
in all else. You have a tender, fond heart; you would have ” 

“ I think my heart is a stone,” said the girl, in a low voice; 
then she added, “In the poem of ‘Aurora Leigh ’ the womaD 


122 


MOTHS. 


loves the child that is born of her ruin; and I am not like that 
Perhaps I am wicked; can you understand ?” 

“ Yes, yes; I understand,” said the Princess Nelaguine, hur« 
riedly, and, though she was accounted in her generation a false 
and heartless little woman of the world, her eyes became dim 
and her hands pressed Yere’s with a genuine pity. Long, long 
years before, Nadine Zouroff had herself been given to a love- 
less marriage, when all her life seemed to her to be lying dead in 
a soldier’s unmarked grave in the mountains of Caucasus. 

“That feeling will change, though, be assured,” she said, 
soothingly. ‘ ‘ When we are very young, all our sorrow is despair; 
but it does not kill us, and we live to be consoled. Once I felt 
like you— yes, but now I have many interests, many ties, many 
occupations, and my sons and daughters are dear to me, though 
they were not Ms; so will be yours, to you, in time.” 

Yere shuddered. 

“ People are different,” she said, simply; “to me it will always 
be the same.” 

She pulled a cluster of white roses, and ruffled them in her 
hands, and threw them down, almost cruelly. 

“Will those roses bloom again?” she said. “What I did to 
them your brother has done to me. It cannot be altered now. 
Forget that I have said anything. I will not again.” 

One year had gone by since Yere had been given, with the 
blessing of her mother and thebenisonof society, to the Minotaur 
of a loyeless marriage. To herself she seemed so utterly changed 
that nothing of her old self was left in her, body or soul. To the 
world she only seemed to have grown lovelier, as was natural 
with maturer womanhood, and to have become a great lady in 
lieu of a graceful child. 

She was little more than seventeen now, but, herself, she felt as 
if centuries had rolled over her head. 

After her winter at the Imperial court, she had been so changed 
that she would at times wonder if she had ever been the glad and 
thoughtful child who had watched the North Sea break itself in 
foam in the red twilight of Northumbrian dawns. 

She had a horror of herself. 

She had a horror of the world. 

But from the world and from herself there was now no escape. 

She was the Princess Zouroff. 

An immense disgust possessed her, and pervaded all her life, 
falling on her as the thick gray fog falls on a sunny landscape — 
heavy, dull, and nauseous. 

The loveliest and youngest beauty in the Salle des Palmiers, 
with the stars of her diamonds shining on her like the planets of 
a summer night, she was the saddest of all earthly creatures. 

The girl who had gone to bed with the sun and risen with it, 
who had spent her tranquil days in study and open-air exercise, 
who had thought it pleasure enough to find the first primrose, 
and triumph enough to write the three letters at the foot of a 
hard problem, who had gone by her grandmother’s side to the 
old dusky church, where noble and simple had knelt together for 
a thousand years, and who had known no more of the evil and 


MOTHS. 


m 


lasciviousness or the world at large than the white ox-eye open- 
ing under the oak glades — the girl who had been Vere Herbert 
on those dark, chill Northumbrian shores was now the Princess 
Vera, and was forever in the glare, the unrest, the fever, and the 
splendor of a great society. 

Night was turned into day; pleasure, as the world construed 
it, filled each hour; life became a spectacle; and she, as a part of 
the spectacle, was ceaselessly adorned, arrayed, flattered, cen- 
sured, and posed— as a model is posed for the painter. AH 
around her was grand, gorgeous, restless, and insincere; there 
was no leisure, though there was endless ennui, and no time for 
reflection, though there were monotony and a satiety of sensa- 
tion. Sin she heard of for the first time, and it was smiled at; 
vice became bare to her, but no one shunned it; the rapacity of 
an ignoble passion let loose and called “ marriage” tore down all 
her childish ignorance and threw it to the winds, destroyed her 
self-respect and laughed at her, trampled on all her modest 
shame, and ridiculed her innocence. 

In early autumn she had given birth to a son, who had lived a 
few hours and then died. She had not sorrowed for its loss; it 
was the child of Sergius Zouroff. She thought it better dead. 
She had felt a strange emotion as she had looked on its little 
body, lying lifeless; but it was neither maternal love nor maternal 
regret; it was rather remorse. 

She had been then at Suir, on the shores of the Baltic, one of 
the chief estates of the Princes of Zouroff, which all the summer 
long had been the scene of festivities, barbaric in their pomp and 
costliness — festivities with which her husband strove to while 
away the year which Imperial command had bidden him pass, 
after marriage, on his hereditary lands. 

“ Do not allow my mother to come to me!” she had said, once, 
with a passionate cry, when the birth of the child had drawn 
near. It was the first time she had ever appealed in any way to 
her husband. He laughed a little grimly, and bis face flushed. 

“ Your mother shall not come,” he said, hastily. “ Do you 
suppose she would wish to be shut up in a sick-room? Perhaps 
she might, though, it is true, miladi always remembers what 
will look well. One must do her the justice to say she always 
remembers that, at least. But no; she shall not come.” 

So it came to pass that her mother in her little octagon boudoir 
in Chesham Place, lined with old fans of the Beau Siecle and 
draped with Spanish lace, could only weep a little with her 
bosom friends, and murmur, “My sweet child! — such a trial! — 
in this horrible weather by the Baltic! — so cruel of the Emperor! 
— and to think my health will not let me go to her!” 

Zouroff, who passionately desired a legitimate son, because he 
hated with a deadly hatred his next brother Vladimir, took the 
loss of the male child to heart with a bitterness which was only 
wounded pride and baffled enmity, but 'which looked like tender- 
ness beside the marble-like coldness and passive indifference of 
his wife. 

Physicians, who always are too clever not to have a thousand 
reasons for everything, alleged that the change of climate and 


m 


MOTHS . 


temperature had affected the health of the Princess Vera; and 
her husband, who hated Russia with all his might, urged this 
plea of her health to obtain a reduction of the time he had been 
ordered to remain on his own lands, and, obtaining what he wish- 
ed from the Tsar, returned in November to the French Riviera. 

He had purchased the villa of his sister from her, although it 
was called still the Villa Nelaguine. He had bought it in a 
mood of captious irritation with his wife, knowing that to Vere, 
reared in the cold, gray days and under the cloudy skies and by 
} the somber seas of the dark North, the Southern seaboard was 
oppressive in its languor and its light. Sometimes he liked to 
hurt her in any way he could: if her child had lived he would 
have made it into a whip of scorpions for her. Yet he always 
lavished on her so much money and so many jewels, and kept 
her so perpetually in the front of the greatest of great worlds, 
that everybody who knew him said that he made a good husband, 
after all — much better than any one would have anticipated. 

He intended to stay at the villa on the Mediterranean for three 
months, and thither came, self-invited because she was so near 
—only at Paris — the Lady Dolly. 

Neither Zouroff nor his sister ever invited her to their houses, 
but pretty Lady Dolly was not a woman to be deterred by so 
mere a trifle as that. 

“I pine to see my sweet treasure!” she wrote; and Sergius 
Zouroff, knitting his heavy brows, said, “ Let her come,” and 
Vere said nothing. 

“What an actress was lost in your mother!” he added, with his 
rough laugh; but he confused the talent of the comedian of so* 
ciety with that of the comedian of the stage, and they are very 
dissimilar. The latter almost always forgets herself in her part; 
the former never. 

So, one fine, sunlit, balmy day toward Christmas, Lady Dolly 
drove up through the myrtle wood that led to the Villa Nela- 
guine. 

It was noonday. The house-guests were straying down from 
up-stairs to breakfast in the pretty Pompeiian room, with its in 
laid marble walls, and its fountains, and its sculpture, and its 
banks of hothouse flowers, which opened on to the white terrace, 
that fronted the rippling blue sea. On this terrace Zouroff was 
standing. 

He saw the carriage approaching in the distance through the 
myrtles. 

“ C'est madarne mere” he said, turning on his heel, and looking 
into the breakfast-chamber. He laughed a little grimlv as he 
said it. 

Vere was conversing with Madame Nelaguine, who saw a 
strange look come into her eyes — aversion, repugnance, contempt, 
pain, and shame all commingled. “ What is there that I do not 
know?” thought the Princess Nadine. She remembered how 
Vere had not returned her mother’s embrace at the marriage » 
ceremony. 

Sergius Zouroff was still watching the carriage’s approach, 
with that hard smile upon his face which had all the brutality 


MOTHS. 


125 


and cynicism of his temper in it, and under which delicate 
women and courageous men had often winced as under the lash. 

“ C’est madam mere” he said, again, with a spray of gardenia 
between his teeth; and then, being a grand gentleman sometimes, 
when the eyes of society were on him, though sometimes being 
rough as a boor, he straightened his loose, heavy figure, put 
the gardenia in his button-hole, and went down the steps, with 
the dignity of Louis Quatorze going to meet a queen of Spain, and 
received his guest, as she alighted, with punctilious politeness and 
an exquisite courtesy. 

Lady Dolly ascended the steps on his arm. 

She was dressed perfectly for the occasion— all a soft dove-hue, 
with soft dove-colored feather trimmings, and silvery furs, with 
a knot of black here and there to highten the chastened effect 
and show her grief for the child that had breathed but an hour. 
On her belt hung many articles, but chief among them was a 
small silver-bound prayer-book, and she bad a large silver cross 
at her throat. 

“ She will finish with religion,” thought Zouroff; “ they always 
take it last.” 

Lady Dolly Avas seldom startled, and seldom nervous; but, as 
her daughter came forward on to the terrace to meet her, she 
was both startled and nervous. 

Vera was in a white morning dress, with a white mantilla of 
old Spanish lace about her head and throat; she moved with 
serene and rather languid grace; her form had developed into the 
richness of womanhood; her face Avas very cold. Her mother 
could see nothing left in this wonderfully beautiful and stately 
person of the child of eighteen months before. 

“Is that Vere?” she cried, involuntarily, as she looked up- 
ward to the terrace above. 

“ That is Vera,” said Sergius Zouroff, dryly. All the differ- 
ence lay there. 

Then Lady Dolly recovered herself. 

“My sweet child! Ah, the sorrow !— the joy!” murmured 
Lady Dolly, meeting her with flying feet and outstretched 
arms, upon the white and black chequers of the marble terrace. 

Vere stood passive, and let her cold cheeks be blushed by 
those softly tinted lips. Her eyes met her mother’s once, and 
Lady Dollv trembled. 

“ Oh, this terrible biseP’ she cried, with a shiver: “you can 
have nothing worse in Russia ! Ah, my dear, precious Vera! I 
was so shocked, so grieved ! — to think that poor little angel was 
lost to us !” 

“ We will not speak of that,” said Yere, in a low voice, that 
was very cold and weary. “You are standing in the worst of 
the wind: will you not come into the house? Yes, I think one 
feels the cold more here than in Russia. People say so.” 

“Yes; because one has sunshades here, and one sees these 
ridiculous palms, and it ought to be Avarm if it isn’t,” answered 
Lady Dolly; but her laugh was nervous, and her lips trembled 
and contracted as she thus met her daughter once more. 

“She is so unnatural!” she sighed to Princess Helaguine; ♦* sc 


MOTHS. 


m 

unnaxural! 'Not a word, even to me, of her poor, dear, little, dead 
child. Not a word! It is really too painful.” 

The Princess Nelaguine answered, dryly, “Your daughter is 
not very happy. My brother is not an angel. But then you knew 
very well, chere madame, that he never was one.” 

“ I am sure he seems very good,” said Lady Dolly, piteously, 
and with fretfulness. She honestly thought it. 

Yere had enormous jewels, constant amusement, and a bottom* 
less purse: the mind of Lady Dolly was honestly impotent to corn 
ceive any state of existence more enviable than this. 

“To think what I am content with!” she thought to herself— 
she, who had to worry her husband every time she wanted a check, 
who had more debts for dress and pretty trifles than she would 
pay if she lived to be a hundred, and who constantly had to bor- 
row half a crown for a cup of tea at Hurlingham, or a rouleau of 
gold to play with at Monaco. 

Those were trials, indeed! 

“I hope you realize that you are my mother-in-law,” said 
Zouroff, as Lady Dolly sat on his right hand and he gave her 
some grapes at breakfast. 

He laughed as he said it. Lady Dolly tried to laugh, but did 
not succeed. 

“You are bound to detest me,” she said, with an exaggerated 
little smile, “ by all precedents of fiction and of fact.” 

“ Oh, no!” said Zourolf. gallantly; “never in fiction or in fact 
had any man so bewitching and youthful a mother-in-law. On 
my life, you look no older than Yera.” 

“ Oh-h!” said Lady Dolly, pleased but deprecatory. “Yera is 
in a grand style, you know. Women like her look older than 
they are at twenty, but at forty they look much younger than 
they are. That is the use of hight and straight features and 
Greek brows. When one is a little doll, like me, one must b« 
resigned to looking insignificant always.” 

“ Is the Yenus de Medici insignificant? she is very small,’ 1 
said Zouroff, still most gallantly; and he added, in a lower key, 
“You were always pretty, Dolly; you always will be. I am 
sorry to see that prayer-book; it looks as if you felt, growing old; 
and you will be wretched if you once get that idea into your 
head:” 

“I feel young,” said Lady Dolly, sentimentally. “But it 
would sound ridiculous to pretend to be so.” 

Her glance went to the graceful and dignified presence of her 
daughter. 

“ Vere is very handsome, very beautiful,” she continued, hesi- 
tatingly. “ But — but — surely she is not looking very well?” 

“ She is scarcely recovered,” said Zouroff, roughly; and the 
speech annoyed him. He knew that his young wije was un- 
happy, but he did not choose for any one to pity her, and for her 
mother of all people, to do so! 

“ Ah! to be sure, no!” sighed Lady Dolly. “ It was so sad — 
poor little angel! But did Yera care mucli? I think not.” 

“I think there is nothing she cares for,” said Zouroff, savage 


V. 


MOTHS 


12 * 


ty “ Who could tell your daughter would oe a piece of ice, a 
remme de marbre? It is too droll, Dolly.” 

“Pray do not call me Dolly,” she murmured, piteously. 
“ People will hear.” 

“Very well, madame mere?’ said Zouroff, and he laughed this 
time aloud. 

She was frightened — half at her own work, half at the change 
wrought in Vere. 

“Who could tell she would alter so soon,” she thought, in 
wonder at the cold, proud woman who looked like a statue and 
moved like a goddess. 

“ To think she is only seventeen!” said Lady Dolly, aloud, in 
bewilderment. 

“ To be married to me is a liberal education,” said her son-in- 
law, with his short, sardonic laugh. 

“ I am sure you are very kind to her,” murmured poor little 
Lady Dolly, yet feeling herself turn pale under her false bloom. 
“The beast!” she said to herself, with a shudder. “ The Cen- 
taurs must have been just like him.” 

She meant the Satyrs. 

“ Sergius,” said Princess Nelaguine to her brother that night, 
“ Vera does not look well.” 

“ No,” he answered, carelessly. “ She is always too pale. I 
tell her always to rouge. If she do not rouge in Paris, she' will 
tecarcely tell in a ball, handsome though she is.” 

“ Rouge at seventeen! You cannot be serious. She only wants 
to be — happy. I do not think you make her so. Do you try?” 

He stared and yawned. 

“ It is not my metier to make women happy. They can be so 
if they like. I do not prevent them. She has ten thousand 
francs a month by her settlements to spend on her caprices; if 
it is not enough, she can have more. You may tell her so. I 
never refuse money.” 

“You speak like a bourgeois ,” said his sister, with some con- 
tempt. Do you think that money is everything? It is nothing 
to a girl like that. She gives it all to the poor; it is no pleasure 
to her.” 

“ Then she is very unlike her mother,” said Prince Zouroff, 
with a smile. 

“ She is unlike her, indeed! You should be thankful to think 
how entirely unlike. Your honor will be safe with her as long 
as she lives; but to be happy, she will want more than you give 
her at present, but the want is not one that money will supply.” 

“She has been complaining?” said her brother, with a sudden 
frown. 

Madame Nelaguine added, with a ready lie, “ Not a word, not 
a syllable. But one has eyes, and I do so wish you to be kind to 
her.” 


“Kind to her?” he repeated, with some surprise. “Iam not 
unkind, that I know of; she has impossible ideas; they make me 
impatient. She must take me and the world as she finds us; but 
l pm certainly not unkind. One does not treat one’s wife like 3 


138 MOTHS.' 

saint. Perhaps you can make her comprehend that. Were sh© 
sensible, like others, she would be happy like them.” 

He laughed, and rose and drank some absinthe. 

His sister sighed, and set her teeth angrily on the cigarette that 
she was smoking. 

“ Perhaps she will in time be happy and sensible like them,” 
she said to herself; “ and then your lessons will bear their proper 
fruits, and you will be deceived like other husbands, and punish- 
ed as you merit. If it were not for the honor of the Zouroffs, I 
should pray for it!” 

The Villa Nelaguine was full of people staying there, and was 
also but five miles distant from Monte Carlo. 

Vere was never alone with her mother during the time that 
Lady Dolly graced the Riviera with her presence, carried her 
red umbrella under the palm-trees, and laid her borrowed napo- 
leons on the color. 

No word of reproach, no word of complaint, escaped her lips in 
her mother’s presence, yet Lady Dolly felt vaguely frightened, 
and longed to escape from her presence, as a prisoner longs to 
escape from the dock. 

She stayed this December weather at Villafranca, where De- 
cember meant blue sea, golden sunshine, and red roses, because 
she thought it was the right thing to do. If there had been peo- 
ple who had said — well, not quite nice things — it was better to 
stay with her daughter immediately on the return from Russia, 
So she did stay, and even had herself visited for a day or two by 
Mr. Vanderdecken on one of his perpetual voyages from London 
to Java, Japan, or Jupiter. 

Her visit was politic and useful; but it cost her some pain, 
some fretfulness, and some apprehension. 

The house was full of pleasant people, for Zouroff never could 
endure a day of even comparative solitude: and amidst them 
was a very handsome Italian noble, who was more agreeable to 
her than the Due de Dinant had of late grown, and who was 
about to go to England to be attached to the embassy 
there, and who had the eyes of Othello with the manners of 
Chesterfield, and whom she made her husband cordially invite 
to Chesham Place. She could play as high as she liked, and she 
could drive over to Monaco when she pleased, and no life suited • 
her better than this life, where she could, whenever she chose, 
saunter through the aloes and palms to those magic halls where 
her favorite fever was always at its hight, yet where everything 
looked so pretty, and appearances were always so well preserved, 
and she could say to everybody, “They do have such good 
music, one can’t help liking Monte Carlo!” 

The place suited her in every way ; and yet she felt stifled in 
it, and afraid. 

Afraid of what? There was nothing on earth to be afraid of, 
she knew that. 

Yet, when she saw the cold, weary, listless life of Vere, and 
met the deep scorn of her eyes, and realized the absolute impo* 
tency of rank, and riches, and pleasure, and all her own adored 
gods, to console or even to pacify this young, wounded soul, Lady 


MOTHS. 


129 


Dolly was vaguely frightened, as the frivolous are always fright- 
ened at any strength or depth of nature or any glimpse of sheer 
despair. 

Not to be consoled! 

What can seem more strange to the shallow? What can seem 
more obstinate to the weak? Not to be consoled is to offend all 
swiftly forgetting humanity, most of whose memories are writ 
1 on water. 

“ It is very strange, she seems to me to enjoy nothing!’* said 
Lady Dolly, one morning, to Madame Nelaguine, when Prince 
Zouroff had announced, at the noonday breakfast, that he had 
purchased for his wife a famous historical diamond known in 
Memoirs and in European courts, as the “Roc’s egg,” and Yere, 
with a brief word of thanks, acknowledged the tidings, her 
mother thought indignantly, as though he had brought her a 
twopenny bunch of primroses. 

“ It is very strange !” repeated Lady Dolly. * ‘ The idea of hear- 
ing that she had got the biggest diamond in all the world, ex- 
cept five, and receiving the news like that! Your brother looked 
disappointed, I think, annoyed; didn’t you?” 

“ If he wants ecstasies over a diamond he can give it to 
Noisette,” said Madame Nelaguine, with her little cold smile. “ 1 
think he ought not to be annoyed that his wife is superior to 
Noisette.” 

“Was Yera always as cold as that at St. Petersburg before her 
child’s death?” pursued Lady Dolly, who never liked Madame 
Nelaguine’s smiles. 

“Yes; always the same.” 

“ Doesn’t society amuse her in the least?” 

“ Not in the least. I quite understand why it does not do so. 
Without coquetry or ambition it is impossible to enjoy society 
much. Every pretty woman should be a flirt, every clever woman 
a politician; the aim, the animus, the intrigue, the rivalry that 
accompany each of those pursuits are the salt without which the 
great dinner were tasteless. A good many brainless creatures do, 
it is true, flutter through society all their lives for the mere pleas- 
ure of fluttering: but that is poor work, after all,” added Madame 
Nelaguine, ignoring the pretty flutterer to whom she was speak- 
ing. “ One needs an aim, just as an angler must have fish in the 
stream or he grows weary of whipping it. Now, your Yere will 
never be. a coquette, because her temperament forbids it. She is 
too proud, and also men have the misfortune not to interest her. 
And I think she will never be a politician; at least, she is inter- 
ested in great questions, but the small means by which men strive 
to accomplish their aims disgust her, and she will never be a 
diplomatist. In the first week she was in Russia she compro- 
mised Sergius seriously at the Imperial court by praising a Nihil- 
ist novelist to the Empress!” 

“Oh, I know!’ said Lady Dolly, desperately. “She has not 
two grains of sense. She is beautiful and distinguished -looking. 
When you have said that you have said everything that is to be 
said. The education she had with her grandmother made hey 
hopelessly stupid, actually stupid!" 


130 


MOTHS. 


“ She is very far from stupid; pardon me,” said Madame Nel- 
aguine, with a delicate little smile. “ But she has not your hap- 
py adaptability, chere madame. It is her misfortune.” 

“A misfortune, indeed,” said Lady Dolly, a little sharply, 
feeling that her superiority was being despised. “ It is always a 
misfortune to be unnatural, and she is unnatural. She takes 
no pleasure in anything that delights every one else; she hardly 
knows serge from sicilienne; and she has no tact, because she 
does not think it worth while to have any. She will offend a 
king as indifferently as she will change her dress; every kind of 
amusement bores her, she is made like that. When everybody 
is laughing round her, she looks grave, and stares like an owl 
with her great eyes. Oh, dear me! to think she should be my 
daughter! Nothing odder ever could be than that Vere should 
be my child.” 

“Except that she should be my brother’s wife,” said Madame 
Nelaguine, dryly. Lady Dolly was silent. 

The next day Lady Dolly took advantage of her husband’s es- 
cort to leave the Villa Nelaguine for England; she went with 
reluctance, yet with relief. She was envious of her daughter, 
and she was impatient with her, and, though she told herself 
again and again that Vere’s destiny had fallen in a golden para- 
dise, the east v/ind that she hated, moaning through the palms, 
seemed to send after her homeward a long-drawn despairing 
sigh — the sigh of a young life ruined. 

Prince Zouroff stayed on in the South, detained there by the 
seduction of the gaming-tables, until the Christmas season was 
past; then, having won very largely, as very rich men often do, 
he left the Riviera for his handsome hotel in the Avenue du Bois 
de Boulogne; and Madame Nelaguine left it also. 

Like many of their country people, they were true children of 
Paris, and were seldom thoroughly content unless they were 
within sight of the dome of the Invalides. 

He felt be would breathe more freely when, from the windows 
of the rail way -carriage, he should see the zinc roofs and shining 
gilt cupolas of his one heaven upon earth. 

‘ ‘ Another year with only her face to look at, with its eyes of 
unending reproach, and I should have gone mad, or cut her 
throat,” he said, in a moment of confidence, to one of his confi- 
dants and parasites. 

They had never been alone one day, indeed; troops of guests 
had always been about them ; but it had not been Paris — Paris, 
with its consolations, its charm, and its crowds. 

In Paris he could forget completely that he had ever married, 
save when it might please his pride to hear the world tell him 
that he had the most beautiful woman in Europe for his wife. 

“ Can you not sleep? Do not stare so with your great eyes!” said 
Prince Zouroff angrily to his wife, as the night train rushed 
through the heart of France, and Vere gazed out over the snow- 
whitened moonlit, country, as the land and the sky seemed to 
fly past her. 

In another carriage behind her was her great jewel-box, set 
between >■ wo servants, whose whole duty was to guard it. 


MOTHS. 


181 


But she never thought of her jewels: she was thinking of the 
moth and the star; she was thinking of the summer morning on 
the white cliff of the sea. For she knew that Correze was in 
Paris. 

It was not any sort of love that moved her, beyond such ling- 
ering charmed fancy as remained from those few hours’ fascina- 
tion. But a great reluctance to see him, a great fear of seeing 
him, was in her. What could he think of her marriage? And 
she could never tell him why she had married thus. lie would 
think her sold like the rest, and he must be left to think so„ 

The express train rushed on through the cold, calm night. With 
every moment she drew nearer to him — the man who had bid- 
den her keep herself “ unspotted from the world.” 

“ And what is my life,” she thought, “except one long pollu- 
tion?” 

She leaned her white cheek and her fair head against the win- 
dow, and gazed out at the dark, flying masses of the clouds; her 
eyes were full of pain, wide opened, lustrous; and, waking sud- 
denly and seeing her thus opposite him, her husband called to 
her roughly and irritably with an oath, “ Can you not sleep?” 

It seemed to her as if she never slept now. What served her 
as sleep seemed but a troubled, feverish, dull trance, disturbed 
by hateful dreams. 

It was seven o’clock on the following evening when they ar- 
rived in Paris. Their carriage was waiting, and she and Mad- 
ame Nelaguine drove homeward together, leaving Zouroff to fol 
low them. There was a faint light of an aurora borealis in the 
sky, and the lamps of the streets were sparkling in millions; the 
weather was very cold. Their coachman took his way past the 
opera-house. There were immense crowds and long lines of 
equipages. 

In large letters, in the strong gaslight, it was easy to read upon 
the placards: 

Faust ..... Correze. 

The opera was about to commence. 

Were shrank back into the depths of the carriage. Her com- 
panion leaned forward and looked out into the night. 

“ Paris is so fickle; but there is one sovereign she never tires 
of: it is Correze,” said Madame Nelaguine, with a little laugh, 
and wondered to see the colorless cheek of her young sister-in' 
law flush suddenly and then grow white again. 

Have you ever heard Correze sing?” she asked, quickry s 

Vere hesitated. 

“ Never in the opera. No.” 

“Ah! to be sure, he left Russia suddenly last winter — left as 
you entered it,” said Madame Nelaguine, musing, and with a 
quick side-glance. 

Vere was silent. 

The carriage rolled on, and passed into the court-yard of the 
Hotel Zouroff, between the gilded iron gates, at the instant when 
the applause of Paris welcomed upon the stage of its opera its 
public favorite. 


m 


MOTHS . 


The house was grand, gorgeous, brilliant, adorned in the taste 
of the Second Empire, to which it belonged — glittering and over- 
laden, superb yet meretricious. The lines of servants were bow- 
ing low; the gilded gaseliers were glowing with light; there 
were masses of camellias and azaleas, beautiful and scentless, 
and heavy odors of burnt pastilles on the heated air. 

Vere passed up the wide staircase slowly, and the hues of its 
scarlet carpeting seemed like fire to her tired eyes. 

She changed her prison-house often, and each one had been 
made more splendid than the last, but each in its turn was no 
less a prison, and its gilding made it but the more dreary and 
the more oppressive to her. 

“ You will excuse me, I am tired,” she murmured to her sister- 
in- law, who was to be her guest; and she went into her own 
bedchamber and shut herself in, shutting out even her maid from 
her solitude. 

Through the curtained windows there came a low, muffled 
sound — the sound of the great night- world of that Paris to which 
she had come, heralded for her beauty by a thousand tongues. 

“ Why could she not be happy?” 

She dropped on her knees by her bed of white satin, embroid- 
ered with garlanded roses, and let her head fall on her arms, aud 
wept bitterly. 

In the opera-house the curtain had risen, and the realization of 
all he had lost was drawing upon the vision of Faust. 

The voice of her husband came to her through the door. 

“Made your toilet rapidly,” he said; “we will dine quickly; 
there will be time to show yourself at the opera.” 

Vere started and rose to her feet. 

“ I am very tired; the journey was long.” 

“We will not stay,” answered Prince Zouroff. “ But you will 
show yourself. Dress quickly.” 

“ Would not another night ” 

“ Ma chere , do not dispute. I am not used to it.” 

The words were slight, but the accent gave them a cold and 
hard command, to which she had grown accustomed. 

She said nothing more, but let her maid enter by an inner door. 

The tears were wet on her lashes, and her mouth still quiver- 
ed. The woman saw and pitied her, but with some contempt. 

“ Why do you lament like that?” the woman thought; “ why 
not amuse yourself?” 

Her maids were used to the caprices of Prince Zouroff, 
which made his wife's toilet a thing which must be accomplished 
to perfection in almost a moment of time. A very young 
and lovely woman, also, can be more easily adorned than one 
who needs a thousand artificial aids. They dressed her very rap- 
idly in white velvet, setting some sapphires and diamonds in her 
bright hair. 

“ Give me that necklace,” she said, pointing to one of the par- 
titions in one of the open jewel-cases: it was the necklace of the 
moth and the star. 

In ten minutes she descended to dinner. She and her husband 
were alone, Madame Nelaguine had gone to bed fatigued. 


MOTHS. 


133 


He ate little, but drank much, though one of the finest artists 
of the Paris kitchens had done his best to tempt his taste with 
the rarest and most delicate combination. 

“ You do not seem to have much appetite,’' he said, after a little 
while. “ We may as well go. You look very well now.” 

He looked at her narrowly. 

Fatigue conquered, and emotion subdued, had given an un- 
usual brilliancy to her eyes, an unusual flush to her cheeks. The 
white, velvet was scarcely whiter than her skin; about her 
beautiful throat the moth trembled between the flame and the 
star. 

“ Have you followed my advice and put on some rouge?” he 
asked, suddenly. 

Vere answered simply; 

“No.” 

“ Iteris will say that you are handsomer than any of the others,” 
he said, carelessly. “"Let us go.” 

Vere’s cheeks flushed more deeply as she rose in obedience. 
She knew that he was thinking of all the other women whom 
Paris had associated with his name. 

She drew about her a cloak of white feathers, and went to her 
carriage. Her heart was sick, yet it beat fast. She had learned 
to be quite still, and to show nothing that she felt under all pain; 
and tbis emotion was scarcely pain, this sense that so soon the 
voice of Correze would reach her ear. 

She was very tired; all the night before she had not slept; the 
fatigue and feverishness of the long unbroken journey were upon 
her, making her temples throb, her head swim, her limbs feel 
light as air. But the excitement of one idea sustained her, and 
made hertpulses quicken with fictitious strength: so soon she would 
hear the Voice of Correze. 

A vague dread, a sense of apprehension that she could not have 
explained, were upon her; yet a delighted expectation came over 
her also, and was sweeter than any feeling tiiat had ever been 
possible to her since her marriage. 

As their carriage passed through the streets, her husband 
smoked a cigarette, and did not speak at all. She was thankful 
for the silence, though she fancied in it he must hear the loud, 
fast beating of her heart. 

It was ten o’clock when they reached the opera-house. Her 
husband gave her his arm, and they passed through the vesti- 
bule and passage, and up the staircase to that door which at the 
commencement of the season had been allotted to the name of 
Prince Zouroff. 

The house was hushed, the music, which has all the ecstasy 
and the mystery of human passion in it, thrilled through the 
stillness. Her husband took her through the corridor into 
their box, which was next that which had once been the em- 
press’. The vast circle of light seemed to whirl before her 
eyes. 

Vere entered as though she were walking in her sleep, and safe 

down. 


134 MV-LUtZ* 

On the stage there were standing alone Marguerite and 
Faust. 

The lights fell full upon the classic profile of Correze, and his 
eyelids were drooped, as he stood gazing on the maiden who 
knelt at his feet. The costume he wore showed his graceful 
form to its greatest advantage, and the melancholy of wistful 
passion that was expressed on his face at that moment made his 
beauty of feature more impressive. His voice was silent at the 
moment when she saw him thus once more, but his attitude was 
a poem, his face was the face that she had seen by sunlight 
where the sweet-brier sheltered the thrush. 

Not for her was he Faust, not for her was he the public idol of 
Paris. He was the Saint Raphael of the Norman sea-shore. She 
sat like one spell-bound, gazing at the stage. 

Then Correze raised his head, his lips parted, and uttered the 

Tu vuoi, aliime! 

Che t’ abbandoni. 

It thrilled through the house, that exquisite and mysterious 
music of the human voice, seeming to bring with it the echo of 
a heaven forever lost. 

Women, indifferent to all else, would weep when they heard 
the voice of Correze. 

Yere’s heart stood still, then seemed to leap in her breast as 
with a throb of new, warm life. Unforgotten, unchanged, un- 
like any other ever heard on earth, this perfect voice fell on her 
ear again, and held her entranced with its harmony. The ear 
has its ecstasy as have other senses, and this ecstasy for the mo- 
ment held in suspense all other emotion, all other memory. 

She sat quite motionless, leaning her cheek upon her hand. 
When he sang, she only then seemed herself to live; when his 
voice ceased, she seemed to lose hold upon existence, and the 
great world of light around her seemed empty and mute. 

Many eyes were turning on her, many tongues were whispering 
of her, but she was unconscious of them. Her husband, glancing 
at her, thought that no other woman would have been so in- 
different to the stare of Paris as she was: he did not know that 
she was insensible of it; he only saw that she had grown very 
pale again, and was annoyed, fearing that her entry would not be 
the brilliant success that he desired it to be. 

“ Perhaps she was too tired to come here,” he thought, with 
some impatience. 

But Paris was looking at her in her white velvet, which was 
like the snows she had quitted, and was finding her lovely 
beyond compare, and worthy of the wild rumors of adoration 
that had come before her from the North. 

The opera, meanwhile, went on its course; the scenes changed, 
the third act ended, the curtain fell, the theater resounded with 
the polite applause of a cultured city. 

She seemed to awake as from a dream. The door had opened, 
and her husband was presenting some great persons to her. 

“You have eclipsed even Correze, princess,” said one of these. 
♦‘In looking at you, Paris forgot for once to listen to its night- 


MOTHS. 


135 


ingale. It was fortunate for him, since he sung half a note 
false.” 

“ Since you are so tired we will go,” said her husband, when 
the fourth act was over, when a score of great men had bowed 
themselves in and out of her box, and the glasses of the whole 
house had been leveled at the Russian beauty, as they termed 
her. 

“ I am not so very tired now,” she said, wistfully. 

She longed to hear that voice of Faust as she had never longed 
for anything. 

“If you are not tired you are capricious, ma chere ,” said her 
husband, with a laugh. “1 brought you here that they might 
see you; they have seen you; now I am going to the club. 
Come.” 

He wrapped her white feathery mantle around her, as though 
it were snow that covered her, and took her away from the 
theater as the curtain rose. 

He left her to go homeward alone, and went himself to the 
Rue Scribe. 

She was thankful. 

“ Yon sang false, Correze!” said mocking voices of women gayly 
around him in the foyer. He was so eminent, so perfect, so felicit- 
ously at the apex of his triumph and of art, that a momentary 
failure could be made a jest of without fear. 

‘ ‘ Pardieu!” said Correze, with a shrug of his shoulders. “ Par- 
dieu! do you suppose I did not know it? A fly flew in my throat. 
I suppose it will be in all the papers to-morrow. That is the 
sweet side of fame.” 

He shook himself free of his tormentors, and went to his 
brougham as soon as his dress was changed. It was only one 
o’clock, and he had all Paris ready to amuse him. 

But he felt out of tone and out of temper with all Paris; anoth- 
er half-note false, and Paris would hiss him — even him. 

He went home to his house in the Avenue Marigny, and sent 
his coachman away. 

“ The beast!” he said to himself, as he entered his chamber: he, 
was thinking of Sergius Zouroff. He threw himself down in an' 
easy-chair, and sat alone lost in thought; whilst a score of sup- 
per-tables were the duller for his absence, and more than one 
woman’s heart ached, or passion fretted, at it. 

“ Who would have thought the sight of her would have 
moved me so?” he said to himself, in self-scorn. “ A false note! 
— I!” 


CHAPTER XIV . 

In the bitter February weather all aristocratic Paris felt the 
gayer, because the vast Hotel Zouroff, in the Avenue du Bois de 
Boulogne, had its scarlet-clad Suisse leaning on his gold-headed 
staff at its portals, and its tribes of liveried and unliveried lac- 
queys languishing in its halls and anterooms; since these signs 
Slowed that the prince and princess were en ville , and that the 


136 


MOTHS. 


renowned beauty of the Winter Palace had brought her loveli- 
ness and her diamonds to the capital of the world. 

The Hotel Zouroff, under Nadine Nelaguine, had been always 
one of those grand foreign houses at which all great people 
meet — a noble terra nullius, in which all political differences 
were obliterated, and all that was either well born or well re- 
ceived met, and the Empire touched the Faubourg, and the 
Orleans princes brushed the marshals of the Republic. The 
Hotel Zouroff had never been very exclusive, but it had always 
been very brilliant. Under the young princess, Paris saw that 
it was likely to be much more exclusive, and perhaps in pro- 
portion less entertaining. There was that in the serene sim- 
plicity, the proud, serious grace of the new mistress of it, 
which rallied to her the old regime and scared away the new. 

“You should have been born a hundred years ago,” said her 
husband with some impatience to her. “You would make the 
house the Hotel Rambouillet.” 

“I do not care for the stories of the ‘Figaro’ at my dinner- 
table, and I do not care to see the romp' of the cotillon in my 
ball-room; but it is your house, it must be ordered as you 
please,” she answered him; and she let Madame Nelaguine 
take the reins of social government, and held herself aloof. 

But, though she effaced herself as much as possible, that tall, 
slender, proud figure, with the grave, colorless face that was 
so cold and yet so innocent, had an effect that was not to be 
defined, yet not to be resisted, as she received the guests of 
the Hotel Zouroff; and the entertainments there, though they 
gained in simplicity and dignity, lost in entrain. Vere was not 
suited to her century. 

Houses take their atmosphere from those who live in them, 
and even the Hotel Zouroff, despite its traditions and its epoch, 
despite its excess of magnificence and its follies of expendi- 
ture, had a fresher and a purer air since the life of its new 
princess had come into it. 

“You have married a young saint, and the house feels al- 
ready like a sacristy/’ said the Duchesse de Sonnez to Sergius 
Zouroff. “Ca nous obsede , mon vieux /” 

That was the feeling of society. 

She was exquisitely lovely, she had a great distinction, she 
knew a great deal, and though she spoke seldom, spoke well, 
but she was o'bsedante ; she made them feel as if they were in 
church. 

Yet Paris spoke of nothing for the moment but of the Prin- 
cess Zouroff. Reigning beauties were for the moment all de- 
throned, and as Paris had for years talked of his racers, his 
mistresses, his play, and his vices, so it now talked of Sergius 
Zouroff’s wife. 

That fair, grave, colorless face, so innocent yet so proud, so 
childlike yet so thoughtful, with its musing eyes and its arched 
mouth, became the theme of artists, the adoration of dandies, 
the despair of women. As a maiden she would have been called 
lovely, but too cold, and passed over. Married, she had that 
position which adorns as diamonds adorn, and that charm as 
forbidden fruit which piques the sated palate of mankind. 

She was the event of the year. 


MOTHS. IS? 

Her husband was not surprised either at her fame or at her 
failure. 

He had foreseen both after the first week of his marriage. 
“ She will be the rage for a season, for her face and her form,” 
he said to himself. “ Then they will find her entetee and stupid, 
and turn to some one else.” He honestly thought her stupid. 

She knew Greek and Latin and all that, but of the things that 
make a woman brilliant she knew nothing. 

Life seemed to Vere noisy, tedious, glaring, beyond conception, 
she seemed, to herself, always to be en scene , always to be being 
dressed and being undressed for some fresh spectacle, always to 
be surrounded with flatterers, and to be destitute of friends, never 
to be alone. It seemed to her wonderful that people who could 
rule their own lives, chose incessant fatigue and called it pleasure. 
She understood it in nothing. That her mother, after twenty 
years ot it, could yet pursue this life with excitement and prefer- 
ence seemed to her so strange that it made her shudder. There 
was not an hour for thought, scarcely a moment for prayer. She 
was very young, and she rose early while the world was still 
sleeping, and tried so to gain some little time for her old habits, 
her old tastes, her old studies, but it was very difficult ; she 
seemed to grow dizzy, tired, useless. “It was what I was sold 
to be,” she used to think, bitterly. Her husband was fastidious 
as to her appearance, and inexorable as to her perpetual display 
of herself; for the rest, he said nothing to her, unless it were to 
reprove her sharply for some oblivion of some trifle in etiquette, 
some unconscious transgression of the innumerable unwritten 
laws of society. 

In the midst of the most brilliant circle of Europe, Vere was as 
lonely as any captured bird. She would have been glad of a 
friend, but she was shy and proud ; women were envious of her, 
and men were afraid of her* She was not like her world or her 
time. She was beautiful, but no one would ever have dreamed 
of classing her with the “ beauties ” made by princely praise and 
public portraiture. She was as unlike them as the beauty of 
perfect statuary is unlike the Lilith and the Vivienne of modern 
painting. 

Sometimes her husband was proud of that, sometimes he was 
annoyed at it. Soon he felt neither pride nor annoyance, but 
grew indifferent. 

Society noticed that she seldom smiled. When a smile did 
come upon her face it was as cold as the moonbeam that flits 
bright and brief across a landscape on a cloudy night. Very close 
observers saw that it was not coldness, but a melancholy too pro- 
found for her years that had robbed the light from her thoughtful 
eyes; but close observers in society are not numerous, and her 
world in general believed her incapable of any emotion or any 
sentiment, save that of a great'pride. 

They did not know that, in the stead of any pride, what 
weighed on her, night and day, was the bitterness of humiliation 
—humiliation they would never have understood— with which no 
one would have sympathized; a shame that made her say to her- 
eelf, when she went to her tribune at Chantilly, to see .her hug* 


188 


MOTHS. 


band’s horses run, “My place should be apart there with those 
lost women; what am I better than they?” 

All the horror of the sin of the world had fallen suddenly on 
her ignorance and innocence, as an avalanche may fall on a 
young chamois; the knowledge of it oppressed her, and made a 
great disgust stay always with her as her hourly burden. 

She despised herself, and there is no shame more bitter to en- 
dure. 

“You are unreasonable, my child,” said her sister-in-law, who, 
in a cold way, was attached to her, and did pity her. “ Any 
other woman as young as yourself would be happy. My brother 
is not your ideal. No, that was not to be expected or hoped for; 
but he leaves you your own way; he is not a tyrant, he lets you 
enjoy yourself as you may please to do; he never controls your 
purse or your caprice. Believe me, my love, that, as the world 
goes, this is as nearly happiness as can be found in marriage — 
to have plenty of money and to be let alone. You want happi- 
ness, I know, but I doubt very much if happiness is really ex- 
istent anywhere on earth, unless you can get it out of social suc- 
cess and the discomfiture of rivals, as most fortunate women do. 

I think you are unreasonable. You are not offended? No?” 

“ Perhaps I am unreasonable,” assented Vere. 

She never spoke of herself. Her lips had been shut on the day* 
that she had accepted the hand of Sergius Zouroff, and she kept 
them closed. 

She would have seemed unreasonable to every one, as to 
Princess Nelaguine, had she done so. 

Why could she not be happy? 

With youth, a lovely face and form, the great world her own, 
and her riches boundless, why could she not be happy, or, at the 
least, amused and flattered? 

Amusement and flattery console most women, but they had 
failed as yet to console her. By example or by precept every one 
about her made her feel that they should do so. Upon the 
danger of the teaching neither her husband nor society ever 
reflected. 

Young lives are tossed upon the stream of the world, like rose- 
leaves on a fast-running river, and the rose-leaves are blamed if 
the river be too strong and too swift for them, and they perish. 
It is the fault of the rose-leaves. 

' When she thought that this life must endure all her life, she 
felt a despair that numbed her, as frost kills a flower. To the 
very young, life looks so long. 

To Sergius Zouroff, innocence was nothing more than the 
virgin bloom of a slave had been to his father — a thing to be 
destroyed for an owners diversion. 

It amused him to lower her, morally and physically, and he 
£ast all the naked truths of human vices before her shrinking 
mind, as he made her body tremble at his touch. It was a diver- 
sion, whilst the effect was novel. Like many another man, he 
never asked himself how the fidelity and the chastity that he still 
expected to have preserved for him' would survive his own work 
of destruction,. He never remembered that as you sow so you 


MOTHS. 


189 


ttiay reap. Nor if lie had remembered would he have cared. 
Toute femme triche was engraved on his conviction as a certain 
doctrine. The purity and the simplicity and the serious sense of 
right and wrong that he discovered in Vere bewildered him, and 
half awed, half irritated him. But that these would last after 
contact with the world, he never for a moment believed, and he 
quickly ceased to regard or to respect them. 

He knew very well that his wife and his belles petites were 
creatures so dissimilar that it seerqed scarcely possible that the 
same laws of nature had created and sustained them, the same 
humanity claimed them. He knew that they were as unlike as 
the dove and the snake, as the rose and the nightshade, but he 
treated them both the same. 

There was a woman who was seen on the Bois who drove with 
white Spanish mules hung about with Spanish trappings, and had 
a little mulatto boy behind her dressed in scarlet. This eccentric 
person was speedily celebrated in Paris. She was handsome in 
a very dark, full-lipped, almond-eyed, mulattress fashion; she 
got the name of Casse-une-Croute, and no one ever heard or cared 
whether she ever had had any other. Casse-une-Croute, who was 
a mustang from over the seas, had made her debut modestly 
with a banker, but she had soon blazed into that splendor in 
which bankers, unless they are Rothschilds, are despised. Prince 
Zouroff had seen * the white mules, and been struck with them, 
Casse-une-Croute had an apotheosis. 

There was an actress who was called Noisette; she was very 
handsome too, in a red and white way, like Rubens’ women; she, 
too, drove herself, but drove a mail-phaeton and very high-step- 
ping English horses; she drank only Burgundy, but plenty of it; 
she had a hotel entre cour et jardin; on the stage she was very 
vulgar, but she had du chien and wonderful drolleries of expres- 
sion. Prince Zouroff did not care even to look at her, but she 
was the fashion, and he had taken her away from his most inti- 
mate friend; so, for years, he let her eat his roubles as a mouse 
eats rice, and never could prevail on his vanity to break with 
her, lest men should think she had broken with him. 

In that unexplainable, instinctive way in which women of 
jquick perceptions come to know things that no one ever tells 
them, and which are never definitely put before them in words, 
.Princess Zouroff became gradually aware that Noisette and Casse- 
une-Croute were both the property of her husband. The white 
mules of the mail-phaeton crossed her own carriage-horses a 
dozen times a week in the Champs Elvsees, and she looked away 
not to see those women, and said, in the bitter humiliation of her 
heart, “What am I better than either of them?” When either 
of them saw her, Casse-une-Croute said, “ V’la la petite!” con- 
temptuously. Noisette said, “ Je manger ai meme ses diamants a 
elle.” 

“ Sergius,” said Nadine Nelaguine, one night, “ in that wife 
that you neglect for your creatures you have a pearl of price.” 

“And I am one of the swine, and best live with my kind,” 
said her brother, savagely, because he was ashamed of himself 


140 


MOTHS. 


and angered with all his ways of life, yet knew that he would n« 
more change them than will swine change theirs. 

“ You have married a young saint. It is infinitely droll!” said 
the Duchesse de Sonnaz, who was always called by her society 
Madame Jeanne, one day to Sergius Zouroff, as he sat with her 
in her boudoir, that was full chinoiseries and Indian wares and 
Persian potteries. 

Jeanne de Sonnaz was a woman thirty -three years old, and had 
be6n one of the few really great ladies who had condescended to 
accept the Second Empire. Born of the spendid Maison de 
Merilhac, and married to the head of the scarce less ancient 
Maison de Sonnaz, she belonged, root and branch, to the vieille 
souche , and her people all went annually to bow the knee at 
Frohsdorf. But Madame Jeanne, wedded at sixteen to a man 
who was wax in her hands, had no fancy for sacrifice and seclu- 
sion for the sake of a shadow and a lily. She was a woman 
who loved admiration and who loved display. She had conde- 
scended to accept the Second Empire, because it was the millen- 
nium of these her twin passions. She had known that it would 
not last, but she had enjoyed it while it did. “ C’est un obus va 
s'eclater” she had 'always said, cheerfully, but meanwhile she had 
danced on the sheilftill it exploded, and now danced on its debris. 

The Duchesse de Sonnaz dressed better than any living being, 
was charming, without having a good feature in her face, ex- 
cept her eyes, and was admired where Helen or Venus might 
have been overlooked. She was not very clever, but she was 
very malicious, which is more successful with society, and very 
violent, which is more successful with lovers. She bad the 
power of being very agreeable.* To the young Princess Zouroff 
she made herself even unusually so. 

Vere did not notice that even a polite society could not help a 
smile when it saw them together. 

“You have married a young saint. It is very droll,” the 
duchess now said, for the twentieth time, to Zouroff. “But do 
you know that I like her? Is not that very droll, too?” 

“ It is very fortunate for me,” said Zouroff, dryly, wondering if 
she were telling him a lie, and, if so, why she told one. 

She was not lying; though, when she had first heard of his in- 
tended marriage, she had been beside herself with rage, and had 
even rung violently for them to send her husband to her, that 
she might cry aloud to him, “You never revenge yourself, but 
you must and you shall revenge me.” Fortunately for the peace 
of Europe, her husband was at the club, and by the time he had 
returned thence she had thought better of it. 

“ What will you do with a saint?” she continued now. “ It ia 
not a thing for you. It must be like that White Swan in ‘ Lohen- 
grin.’ ” 

“ She is stupid,” said Zouroff; “ but she is very honest.” 

“ How amusing a combination!” 

“ I do not see much of her,” Zouroff added, with an air of 
fatigue. “I think she will be always the same. She does not 
adapt herself. It is a pity her children should not live. She ia 
the sort of woman to be a devoted mother.” 


MOTHS. w 141 

u Quel beau role ! and she is not eighteen yet,” said Madame de 
Sonnaz. with amusement. * ' ^ 

“It is what we marry good women for,” he said, somewhat 
gloomily. “They never divert one; everyone knows that. Elies 
ne savent pas s'encanailler .” 

Jeanne de Sonnaz laughed again, but her face had an angry 
irony in it. 

“Yes: nous nous encanaillons; that is our charm. A beautiful 
compliment. But it is true. It is the charm of our novels, of 
our theaters, of our epoch. Le temps nous enfante. Things 
manage themselves drolly. A man like you gets a young angel; 
and an honest, stupid, innocent soul like my poor Paul gets 
— me.” 

Zouroff offered her no compliment and no contradiction; he 
was sitting gloomily amidst the chinoiseries and porcelains, but 
their intercourse had long passed the stage at which flattery is 
needful. He was glad for the sake of peace that she was not an 
enemy of Vere’s; but he was annoyed to hear her praise his wife. 
Why did every one regard the girl as sacrificed ? It offended and 
annoyed him. She had everything that she could want. Hun- 
dreds of women would have asked no more admirable fate than 
was hers. 

“She is of the old type; the old type, pure are proud,” his 
friend pursued, unheeding his silence. “We want to see it now 
and then. She would go grandly to the guillotine, but she will 
never understand her own times, and she will always have a con- 
tempt for them. She has dignity; we have not a scrap, we have 
forgotten what it was like; we go into a passion at the amount 
©f our bills; we play and never pay; we smoke and we wrangle- 
we have cafe-singers who teach us slang songs; we laugh loud, 
much too loud; we intrigue vulgarly, and, when we are found 
out, we scuffle, which is more vulgar still; we inspire nothing, 
unless now and then a bad war or a disastrous speculation; we 
live showily, noisily, meanly, gaudily. You have said, ‘ On salt 
s'encanailler .’ Well, your wife is not like us. You should be 
thankful.” 

“All the same,” said Zouroff, with a shrug of his shoulders, 
“ she is not amusing.” 

“ Oh, that is another affair. Even if she were, I do not believe 
you would go to your wife to be amused. I think you are simply 
discontented with her because she is not somebody else’s wife. 
If she were fast and frivolous you would be angry at that.” 

“ She is certainly not fast or frivolous!” 

“ Perhaps, my friend — after all — it is only that she is not 
happy.” 

It was the one -little poison-tipped arrow that she could not 
help speeding against the man whose marriage had been an in- 
sult to a “friendship” of many years’ duration. 

“ If she were not a fool she would be perfectly happy,” he an- 
swered, petulantly, and with a frown. 

“ Or if she understood compensations as we understand them,” 
$aid Madame de Sonnaz, lighting a cigarette. “Perhaps she 


m MOTHS. 

never will imuerstand them. Or perhaps, on the other hand 
some day she will.” 

“ Vous plaiscintez , madame ,” said Sergius Zouroff, with a 
growl, as the duchess laughed. 

A sullen resentment rose in him against Vere, He had meant 
to forget her, once married to her. The marriage had been a 
caprice; he had been moved to a sudden passion that had been 
hightened by her aversion and her reluctance; she^did as well as 
another to bear children and grace his name; he had never meant 
to make a burden of her, and now every one had agreed to speak 
of her as a martyr to her position. 

Her position! he thought; what woman in Europe would not 
have been happy in it? 

Yere herself might have fanciful regrets and fantastic senti- 
ments; that he could admit; she was a child, and had odd thoughts 
and tastes; but he resented the pity for her — pity for her as being 
his — that spoke by the cynical lips of his sister and Jeanne de 
Sonnaz. 

He began almost to wish that she would be brought to under- 
stand the necessity de s'encanailler. There are times when the 
very purity of a woman annoys and oppresses a man — even when 
she is his wife; perhaps most of all when she is so. 

If she had disobeyed him or had any fault against him, he could 
stilljjhave found some pleasure in tyranny over her; but she never 
rebelled, she never opposed him. Obedience was all she had to 
give, and she gave it in all loyalty; her grandmother had reared 
her in old-world ideas of duty that she found utterly out of 
place in the day she lived in, yet she clung to them as she clung 
to her belief in heaven. 

Her whole nature recoiled from the man to whom she owed 
obedience, yet she knew obedience was his due, and she gave it. 
Although he would have borne with nothing less, yet this pas- 
sive submission had begun to irritate him; his commands were 
caprices, willful, changeable, and unreasonable. But, as they 
were always obeyed, it ceased to be any amusement to impose 
them. 

He began to think that she was merely stupid. 

He would have believed that she was quite stupid, and noth- 
ing else, but for a certain look in her eyes now and then when 
she spoke, a certain gesture that occasionally escaped her of 
utter contempt and weariness. Then he caught sight for a mo- 
ment of depths in Vere’s nature that he did not fathom, of pos- 
sibilities in her character that he did not take into consideration . 

Had she been any other man’s wife, the contradiction would 
have attracted him, and he would have studied her temper and 
her tastes. As it was, he only felt some irritation, and some 
ennui because his wife was not like his world. 

- “ She is not amusing, and she is not grateful,” he would say, 
and each day he saw less of her, and left her to shape bev own 
life as she chose. 


MOTHS. 


143 


CHAPTER XV. 

In the chilly spring weather, Lady Dolly, sitting on one chair 
with her pretty little feet on another chair, was at Hurlingham, 
watching the opening match of the year and saying to her friend 
Lady Stoat of Stitchley, “Oh, my dear, yes, it is so sad, but you 
know my sweet child never was quite like other people — never 
will be, I am afraid. And she never did care for me. It was all 
that horrid old woman, who brought her up so strangely, and 
divided her entirely from me in every way, and made a perfect 
Methodist of her, really a Methodist! If Vere were not so ex- 
quisitely pretty she would be too ridiculous. As she is so hand- 
some, men don’t abuse her so much as they (would if she were 
only just nice-looking. But she is very, very odd; and it is so 
horrible to be odd. I would really sooner have her ugly. She 
is so odd. Never would speak to me of the birth and death of 
her baby. Could you believe it? Not a word! not a word! What 

would you feel if Gwendolin Goodness! the duke and Fred 

have tied. Is it true, Colonel Rochfort? Yes? Thanks. A pencil 
one moment; thanks. Ah, you never bet, Adine, do you? But, 
really, pigeon-shooting’s very stupid if you don’t. Talking of 
Ibets, Colonel Rochfort, try and get ‘two monkeys' for me on 
Tambour-Battant to-morrow, will you? I’ve been told a thing 
about his trainer; it will be quite safe, quite. As I was saying, 
dear. She never would speak to me about that poor, little, lost 
cherub. Was it not sad — terrible? Of course, she will have 
plenty of others; but, still, never to sorrow for it at all— so un- 
natural! Zouroff felt it much more; he has grown very nice, 
really very nice. Ah! that bird has got away; the Lords will 
lose, I am afraid, after all. Ah, my dear Lesterel, how are 
you? What are they saying of my child in your Paris?” 

The Marquis de Lesterel, secretary of legation, bowed smiling. 

“Madame la Princesse has turned the head of ‘tout Paris.' 
It was too cruel of you, madame; had you not already done 
mischief enough to men, that you must distract them with such 
loveliness in your daughter?” 

“All that is charming, and goes for nothing,” said Lady Dolly, 
good-humoredly. “I know Vera is handsome; but does she 
take? Est-ce qu'elle a du charme? That is much more.” 

“But certainly!” rejoined the French marquis, with much 
emphasis; “she is very cold, it is true, which leave us all lament- 
ing; and nothing, or very little at least, seems to interest her.” 

“Precisely what I expected!” said Lady Dolly, despairingly. 
“Then She has not du charme. Nobody has who is not amused 
easily and amused often.” 

“Pardon!” said the marquis. “There is charme and charme. 
There is that of the easily accessible and of the inaccessible, 
of the rosebud and of the edelweiss.” 

“Does she make many friends there?” she continued, pursuing 
her inquiries, curiosity masked as maternal interest. “Many 
women-friends, I mean; I am so afraid Vera does not like 
[women much, and there is nothing that looks so unamiable,” 


144 


MOTHS 


“ It would be impossible to suspect the princess of unamiabil* 
ity,” said the marquis, quickly. “ One look at that serene and 
noble countenance ” 

“Very nice, very pretty; but Vere can be unamiable,” said 
her mother, tartly. “ “Do tell me, is there any woman she takes 
to at all? Any one she seems to like much?” 

(“ Anybody she is likely to tell about me?” she was thinking, in 
the apprehension of her heart.) 

“ Mhdame Nelaguine ” — began the young man. 

“ Oh, her sister-in-law!” said Lady Dolly. “Yes, I believe she, 
does like that horrid woman. I always hated Nadine myself— 
such an ordering, sharp creature, and such a tongue! Of course 
I know the Nelaguine is never out of their house. But is there 
anybody else?” 

A little smile came upon the face of the Parisian. 

“ The princess is often with Madame de Sonnaz. Madame 
Jeanne admires her very much. 

Lady Dolly stared a minute, and then laughed; and Lady Stoat 
even smiled discretely. 

“ I wonder what that is for,” murmured Lady Dolly, vaguely, 
and, in a whisper to Lady Stoat, she added, “She must mean 
mischief; she always means mischief: she took his marriage too 
quietly not to avenge herself.” 

“ People forget nowadays; I don’t think they revenge,” said 
Lady Stoat, consolingly. 

“ When did you see my poor darling last?” asked Lady Dolly, 
aloud. 

“At three o'clock last night, madame, at the Elysee. She 
looked like a Greek poet’s dream draped by Worth.” 

“ How very imaginative!” said Lady Dolly, a little jealously. 
“How could poor dear Worth dress a dream? That w^ould tay 
even his powers! I hope she goes down to Surennes and chatL 
with him quietly: that is the only way to get him to give his 
mind to anything really good. But she never cares about that 
sort of thing — never!” 

“ The Princess Zouroff knows well,” said the Marquis de Les- 
terel, with some malice and more ardor, “ that let her drape her- 
self in what she might, were it sackcloth and ashes, she would 
be lovelier in it than any other woman ever was on earth — ex- 
cept her mother,” he added, with a chivalrous bow. 

“ What a horrid thing it is to be anybody’s mother! and how 
old it makes one feel, * shunt ’ it as one may!” thought Lady 
Dolly, as she laughed and answered, “You are actually in love 
with her, marquis! Pray remember that I am her mother, and 
that she has not been married much more than a year. I am 
very delighted that she does please in Paris. It is her home, 
really her home. They will go to Petersburg once in ten years, 
but Paris will see them every year of their lives: Zouroff can be 
scarcely said to exist out of it. I am so very, very sorry the boy 
died; it just lived to breathe and be baptized, you know — named 
after the Tsar. So sad! — oh, so sad! Who is that shooting now? 
Kegv? Ah-h-h! The bird is inside the palings, isn’t it? Oh, that 
auperbl Just inside!—- only just I” 


MOTHS. 145 

And Lady Dolly scribbled again in a tiny betting-book, bound 
in oxidized silver, that had cost fifty guineas in Bond Street. 

Lady Dolly was very fond of betting. As she practiced it, it 
was both simple and agreeable. She was always paid, and never 
paid. 

The ladies who pursue the art on these simplified principles are 
numerous, and find it profitable. 

When Colonel Rochfort, a handsome young man in the Rifles, 
tried the next day to get her five hundred “ on,” at Newmarket, 
the Ring was prudent: it would take it in his name, not in 
hers. 

But the men of her world could not be as prudent — and as 
rude — as the Ring was. Besides, Lady Dorothy Vanderdecken 
was still a very pretty woman, with charming little tricks of 
manner and a cultured, sagacious coquetry that was hard to re- 
sist; and she was very good company, too, at a little dinner at the 
Orleans Club, when the nightingales sang, or tete-a-tete in her 
fan-lined octagon boudoir. 

Lady Dolly did not see much of her daughter. Lady Dolly 
had taken seriously to London. London had got so much nicer, 
she said, so much less starchy, so much more amusing; it was 
quite wonderful how London had improved since polo and 
pigeon-shooting had opened its mind. Sundays were great fun 
in London now, and all that old nonsense about being so very 
particular had quite gone out. London people, the very best of 
them, always seemed, somehow or other — what should one say? 
— provincial, after Paris — yes, provincial; but still London was 
very nice, and Lady Dorothy Vanderdecken was quite a great 

E erson in it; she had always managed so well that nobody ever 
ad talked about her. 

“ It is so horrid to be talked about, you know,” she used to 
say, “ and, after all, so silly to get talked about. You can do 
just as you like if you are only careful to do the right things at 
the right time and be seen about with the right people. I am 
always so angry with those stupid women that are compromised: 
it is quite too dreadfully foolish of them, because, you know, 
really , nobody need be. People are always nice if one is nice to 
them.” 

So, from New Year to Midsummer she was in the house in 
Chesham Place, which she made quite charming with all sorts of 
old Italian things and the somber and stately Cinque Cento, ef- 
fectively, if barbarously, mixed up with all the extravagancies of 
modern upholstery. Lady Dolly's house, under the combination 
of millinery and medievalism, was too perfect, everybody said; 
and she had a new friend in her Sicilian attached to the Italian 
Legation, who helped her a great deal with his good taste, and 
sent her things over from his grim old castles in Taormina; and 
it was a new toy and amused her; and her fancy-dress frisks, and 
her musical breakfasts, were great successes; and, on the whole, 
Lady Dolly had grown very popular. As for Mr. Vanderdecken, 
he was always stingy and a bear, but he knew how to behave. 
He represented a remote and peaceable borough, which he had 
bought as his wife bought a poodle or a piece of pate tendre; he 


146 


MOTHS. 


snored decorously on the benches of St. Stephen’s, and went to 
ministerial dinners, and did other duties of a rich man’s life, and 
for the rest of his time was absorbed in those foreign specula- 
tions and gigantic leans which constituted his business, and took 
him to Java, or Japan, or Jupiter, so often. He was large, ugly, 
solemn, but he did extremely well in his place, which was an un- 
obtrusive one, like the great Japanese bonze who sat cross-leg- 
ged in the hall. What he thought no one knew; he was as mute on 
the subject of his opinions as the bonze was. In the new order 
of fashionable marriage a silence that must never be broken is 
the part allotted to the husband, and the only part he is expect- 
ed to take. 

On the whole, Lady Dolly was very contented. Now and then 
Jura would give her a somber glance, or Zouroff a grim smile, 
that recalled a time to her when she had been on the very brink 
of the precipice, on the very edge of the outer darkness, and the 
recollection made her quite sick for the moment. But the qualm 
soon passed. She was quite safe now, and she had learned wis- 
dom. She knew how to be “ so naughty and so nice” in the way 
that society in London likes and never punishes. She had been 
very silly sometimes, but she was never silly now, and meant 
never to be silly any more. She tempered roulette with ritualism, 
and always went to St. Margaret’s Church in the morning of a 
Sunday, if she dined down at the Orleans or at old Skindle’s in 
the evening. She had had a great “ scare,” and the peril and the 
fright of it had sobered her and shown her the way she should go. 

For Lady Dolly was'always very!careful of appearances; she had 
no patience with people who were not. * 4 It is such very bad form 
to make people talk,” she would always say; “ and it is so easy 
to stop their mouths.” 

Lady Dolly liked to go to court, to be intimate with the best 
people, to dine at royal tables, and to “be in the swim” alto- 
gether. Everybody knew she was a naughty little woman, but 
she had never been on the debatable land: she had never been 
one of th e “ paniers a quinze sous;” she had never been coldly 
looked on by anybody. She never let “ Jack,” or anybody who 
preceeded or succeeded “ Jack,” get her into trouble. She liked 
to go everywhere, and she knew that if people once begin to talk 
you may very soon go nowhere. 

She was not very wise in anything else, but she was very wise 
in knowing her own interests. Frightened and sobered, she had 
said to herself that it was a horrible thing to get any scandal 
about you; to fall out of society; to have to content yourself with 
third-rate drawing-rooms; to have to take your gayeties in ob- 
scure continental towns; to reign still, but only reign over a lot 
of shady, dubious declasse people, some with titles and some with- 
out, but all “nowhere” in the great race. It was a horrible 
thing; and she vowed to herself that never, never, should it be 
her fate. 

So she took seriously to the big house in Chesham Place, and 
her religion became one of the prettiest trifles in all the town. 

With her brougham full of hothouse flowers, going to the 
Children’s Hospital, or shutting herself up and wearing black all 


MOTHS. 


147 


Holy Week, she was a most edifying study. She maintained 
some orphans at the Princess Mary’s pet home, and she was 
never absent if Staffor House had a new charitable craze. She 
did not go into extremes, for she had very good taste, but only 
eaid, very innocently, “ Oh, all these things are second nature to 
me, you know: you know my poor Vere was a clergyman.” 

If she did sing naughty little songs after dinner on the lawn at 
the Orleans, if the Sicilian attache were always rearranging pic- 
tures or tapestries in her drawing-rooms, if she did bet and lose 
and never pay, if she did go to fancy frisks in a few yards of gos- 
samer and her jewels, nobody ever said anything, except that she 
was such a dear little woman. It is such a sensible thing to “ pull 
yourself together” and be wise in time. 

Lord Jura, who was leading his old life, with Lady Dolly left 
out of it, stupidly and joylessly, because he had got into the 
groove of it and could not get out, and who had become gloomy, 
taciturn, and inclined to drink more than was good for him, 
used to watch the comedy of Lady Dolly’s better-ordered life 
with a cynical savage diversion. When he had come back from 
his Asiatic hunting tour, which had lasted eighteen months, he 
had met her as men and women do meet in society, no matter 
what tragedies divide or hatreds rage in them; but she had seen 
very well that “ Jack” was lost to her forever. She did not even 
try to get him back; and when she heard men say that Jura was 
not the good fellow he used to be, and played too high and drank 
too deep for the great name he bore, she was pleased, because he 
had bad no earthly right to go off in that rough way, or say the 
things he had said. 

“ I never see very much of Jura now,” she would say to her 
friends. “He is become so very farouche since that Eastern trip; 
perhaps some woman — I said so to his dear old father last week: 
poor Jack is so good and so weak, he is just the man to fall a 
prey to a bad woman.” 

The ladies to whom she said this laughed a little among them- 
selves when they had left her, but they liked her all the better 
for ridding herself of an old embarrassment so prettily; it formed 
a very good precedent. Jura, of course, said nothing, except to 
his very intimate friends, who rallied him* To them he said: 
“ Well, I went to India, £you know, and she didn’t like it, and 
when I came back she had got the Sicilian fellow with pier. So 
I don’t bore her any more. She is a dear little woman — yes.” 

For honor makes a lie our social life’s chief necessity, and Jura, 
having thus lied for honor's sake, would think of the Princess 
Zouroff in Paris, and swear round oaths feto himself, and go up- 
stairs where they were playing bacarat and signing fortunes and 
estates away with the scrawl of a watch-chain’s pencil. 

“ 1 think I could have made her happy if it hadn’t been impos- 
sible,” he would think sometimes. “She would always have 
been miles beyond me, and do man that ever lived would have 
been [[good enough for her; but I think I could have made her 
happy; I would have served her and followed her like a dog: 
anyway I would have been true to her, and kept my [life deceit 
and clean; not like that brute’s,” 


148 


MOTHS. 


Then he would curse Sergius Zouroff, as he went home alone 
down St. James’ Street, in the gray fog of early morning, sick of 
pleasure, weary of play, dull with brandy, but not consoled by 
it; knowing that he might have been a better man, seeing the 
better ways too late; loathing the senseless routine of his life, 
but too listless to shake off habit and custom and find out any 
different or higher life. 

He was Earl of Jura; he had a vast inheritance; he had good 
health and good looks; he was sound in wind and limb; he had 
a fair share of intelligence, if his mind was slow; in a few years, 
when he should succeed to his father, he would have a thousand 
pounds a day as his income. Yet he had got as utterly into a 
groove that he hated as any ploughman that rises every day to 
tread the same fields behind the same cattle; and habit made 
him as powerless to get out of it as his poverty makes the plough- 
man. 

“ London is the first city in the world, they say,” he thought, 
as he went down St. James’ in the mists that made a summer 
morning cheerless as winter, and as colorless. “Well, it may 
be, for aught I know; but damn it all if I don’t think the Sioux 
in the big swamps, or the hill tribes in the Cashgar passes, are 
more like men than we are. And we are all so used to it, we 
Kever see what fools we are.” 


CHAPTER XVI 

One morning the young Duke of Mull and Cantire arrived ii\ 
Paris, where he was seldom seen, and chanced to find his cousin 
alone in her morning room at the Hotel Zouroff. 

He was a good-looking young man, with a stupid, honest face; 
he dressed shabbily and roughly, yet always looked like a gentle- 
man. He had no taleDts, but, to compensate, he had no vices: 
he was very simple, very loyal, and very trustful. He was fond 
of Vere, and had been dismayed at the marriage so rapidly 
arranged; but he had seen her at St. Petersburg, and was de- 
ceived by her coldness and calm into thinking her consoled by 
ambition. 

“ I am about tojmarry, too,” he said, with a shame-faced laugh, 
a little while after his entrance. “I have asked her again, and 
she says, ‘Yes.’ I ran down to Paris to tell you this.” 

Vere looked at him with dismay. 

“You do not mean Fuschia Leach?” she said, quickly. 

The young duke nodded. 

“She’s quite too awfully pretty, you know; a fellow can’t 
help it.” 

“She is pretty, certainly.” 

“ Oh, hang it, Vere, that’s worse than abusing her. You hate 
her, I can see. Of course I know she isn’t our form, but — but — I 
am very fond of her, dreadfully fond of her; and you will see, in 
a year or two, how fast she will pick it all up—” j] 

Vere sat silent. 

She was deeply angered; her chief fault was pride, and incur* 


MOTHS. 


149 


able pride of birth with all its prejudices, strong as the preju- 
dices of youth alone can be. 

“ Won’t you say something kind?” faltered her cousin. 

“ I cannot pretend what I do not feel,” she said, coldly. “1 
think such a marriage a great unworthiness, a great disgrace. 
This — this — person is not a gentlewoman, and never will be orue; 
and I think that you will repent giving your name to her — if 
you do ever give it.” 

“ I give it most certainly,” said the young lover, hotly and 
sullenly; “ and if you and I are to be friends, dear, in the future, 
you must welcome her as a friend, too.” 

“ I shall not ever do that,” said Yere, simply; but the words; 
though they were so calm, gave him a chill. 

“I suppose you will turn the forests into coal-mines now?” sli* 
added, after a moment’s pause. The young man reddened. 

“ Poor grandmamma l” said Vere, wistfully and her eyes filled 
with tears. 

The stem old woman loved her grandchildren well, and had 
done her best by them, and all they were fated to bring her in 
her old age were pain and humiliation. 

Would the old duchess ever force herself to touch the flower* 
like cheek of Fuschia Leach with a kiss of greeting? Never, 
thought Yere; never, never! 

“ When all is said and done,” muttered the young duke; 
angrily, “ what is the utmost you can bring against my poof 
love? That she is not our form? That she doesn’t talk in our 
way, but says ‘ cunning ’ where we say ‘ nice ’? Is that a great 
crime? She is exquisitely pretty. She is as clever as anything: 
a prince of the blood might be proud of her. She has a foot for 
Cinderella’s slipper. She never tried to catch me, not she; she 
sent me about my business twice — laughed at me because I weal 
such old hats; she’s as frank as- sunlight! God bless her!” 

“ I think we will not speak of her,” said Yere, coldly,. “ Of 
course you do as you please. I used to think Herbert of Mull a 
great name, but perhaps I was mistaken. I was only a child. I 
am almost glad it has ceased to be mine, since so soon she Will 
own it. Will you not stay to dinner? Monsieur Zouroff will be 
most bapp 3 r to*see you.” 

“I will see your husband before I leave Paris,” said the 
young man, a little moodily, “and I am very sorry you take it 
like that, Yere, because you and I were always good friends at 
old Bulmer.” 

“I think you will find every one will take it like that — who 
cares for you or your honor.” 

4 Honor!— Yere, I should be sorry to quarrel. We won’t dis- 
cuss this thing. It is no use.” 

“No. It is no use.” 

But she sighed as she spoke; it was a link the more added to the 
heavy chain that she dragged with her now. Every one seemed 
failing her, and all old faiths seemed changing. He was the 
head * of her family, and she knew his uprightness, his excel- 
lence, his stainless honor; and he was about to marry Fuschia 
Leach, 


150 / 


MOTHS . 


The risit of her cousin brought back to her, poignantly ante 
freshly, the pain of the letter written to her on her own marriage 
from Bulmer. A great longing for that old innocent life, all dull 
andjsomber though it had been, came on her as she sat in solitude 
after he had left her, and thought of the dark wet woods, the 
rough gray seas, the long gallops on forest ponies, the keen 
force of the north wind beating and bending the gnarled storm* 
shaven trees. 

What would she have given to have been Vere Herbert 
once again! never to have known this weary, gilded, perfumed, 
decorated, restless, and insincere world to which she had been 
sold. 

“ Really, I don’t know what to say,” said Lady Dolly, when 
in her turn, she heard the tidings in London. ‘ ‘ No, really I don’t. 
Of course you ought to marry money, Frank — an immensity of 
money; and most of these Americans have such heaps. It is a 
very bad marriage for you, very; and yet she is so very much the 
fashion, I really don’t know what to say. And it will drive your 
grandmother wild, which will be delightful; and these American 
women always get on somehow; they have a way of getting on: 
I dare say she will be Mistress of the Robes, some day, and all 
sorts of things. She is horribly bad form; you don’t mind my 
saying so; because you must see it for yourself. Butjjthen it goes 
down, and it pleases better than anything; so, after all, I am not 
sure that it matters. And, besides, she will change wonderfully 
when she is Duchess of Mull. All those wild little republicans 
get as starchy as possible once they get a European title. They 
are just like those scatterbrained princes in history that turn 
out such stern goody-goody sort of despots when once the crown 
is on their heads. Really, I don’t know what to say. I knew quite 
well she meant to get you when she went to Stagholme, this Octo- 
ber, after you. Oh, you thought it was accident, didyou? How 
innocent of you, and how nice! You ought to have married more 
money; and it is horrible to have a wife who never had a grand- 
father; but still, I don’t know, she will make your place very live- 
ly, and she won’t let you wear old hats. Yes, yes — you might have 
done worse. You might have married out of a music-hall or a 
circus. Some of them do. And, after all, Fuschia Leach is a per- 
son everybody can know .” 

The young lover did not feel much comforted by this form of 
congratulation, but it was the best that any of his own family 
and friends had given him, and Lady Dolly quite meant to be 
kind. 

She was rather glad herself that the American would be 
Duchess of Mull. She had hated all the Herberts for many a 
long year, and she knew that, one and all, they would sooner 
have seen the young chief of their race in his grave. Lady Dolly 
felt that, in large things and in little, Providence, after treating 
her very badly, was at last giving her her own way. 

The young Duke|of Mull, a month later, had his way, and mar- 
ried his brilliant Fuschia in the teeth of the stiffest opposition 
and blackest anathemas from his family. Not one of them 


MOTHS. 181 

deigned to be present at the ceremony of his sacrifice except his 
aunt,' Lady Dorothy Vanderdecken, who said to her friends: 

“ I hate the thing quite as much as they all do, but I can’t be 
ill-natured, and poor Frank feels it so; and, after all, you know, 
he might have married out of a music-hall or a circus. So many 
of them do.” 

People said what a dear, little, amiable woman she was, so dif- 
ferent from her daughter; and, on the whole, the marriage, with 
choral service at the abbey, and breakfast at a monster hotel, 
where Mrs. Leach had a whole half of the first floor, was a very 
magnificent affair, and was adorned with great names despite 
the ominous absence of the Herberts of Mull. 

“ I’m glad that girl put my monkey up about the coal, and 
made me whistle him back,” thought the brilliant Fuschia to 
herself as the choir sang her epithalamium. “ It’s a whole suit 
and all the buttons on. After all, a duchess is always a four- 
horse concern when she’s an English one; and they do think it 
some pumpkins at home. I’m afraid the money’s whittled away 
a good deal; but we’ll dig for that coal before the year’s out. 
Duchess of Mull and Cantire! After all, it’s a big thing, and 
sounds smart.” 

And the bells, as they rang, seemed to her fancy to ring that, 
and that only, all over London. “Duchess of Mull! Duchess 
of Mull!” 

It was a raw, dark, rainy day in the middle of March, as un- 
pleasant as London weather could possibly be; but the shining 
eyes of the lovely Fuschia, and her jewels, and her smiles, seemed 
to change the sooty, murky mists to tropic sunshine. 

“ How will you quarter the arms, Frank?” whispered Lady 
Dolly, as she bade her nephew adieu. “ A pig gules with a knife 
in its throat, and a bottle argent of pick-me-up?— how nice the 
new blazonries will look!” 

But the young duke had no ears for her. 

Very uselessly, but very feverishly, the obligation to call 
Fuschia Leach cousin irritated the Princess Zouroff into an un- 
ceasing pain and anger. To her own cousin on the marriage she 
sent a malachite cabinet and some grand jade vases, and there 
ended her acknowledgment of it. She was offended, and did not 
conceal it. 

When the world, who had adored Pick-me-up as a maiden, found 
Pick -me-up as Duchess of Mull and Cantire as adorabh as another 
generation had found Georgina Duchess of Devonshire, Vere’s 
proud mouth smiled with ineffable contempt. 

“ What will you, my love?” sighed Madame Nelaguine. “ She 

is frightfully vulgar, but it is a piquant vulgarity. It takes.” 

Vere frowned and her lips set close. 

“She has made him sink coal-shafts in the forest already— out 
forest!” 

Madame Nelaguine shrugged her shoulders. 

“It is a pity, for the forests. But we dig for salt; it i 
Cleaner, prettier, but I am not sure that it is more princely, salt 
than coal.” 

“ No Herbert of Mull lias ever done it,” said Vere, with dark 


152 


MOTHS. 


erring, flashing eyes. “Not one in all the centuries that we have 
been on the Northumberland seaboard, for we were there in the 
days of Otterbourne and Flodden. No man of them would ever 
do it. Oh, if you had ever seen that forest! and soon now it will 
be a blackened, smoking, reeking, treelees waste. It is shameful 
of my cousin Francis.” 

“He is in love still, and does what she tells him. My dear, 
our sex is divided into two sorts of women — those who always 
get their own way, and those who never get it. Pick-me-up, as- 
they call your cousin’s wife in London, is of the fortunate first 
sort. She is vulgar, ignorant, audacious, uneducated, but she 
takes, and in her way she is maitresse femme. You have a 
thousand times more mind, and ten thousand times more charac- 
ter, yet you do not get your own way; you never will get it.” 

“I would have lived on beechmast and acorns from the forest 
trees sooner than have sunk a shaft under one of them,” said 
Vere, unheeding, only thinking of the grand old glades, the 
deep, still greenery, the mossy haunts of buck and doe, the up- 
lands and the yellow gorse, that were to be delivered over now 
to the smoke-fiend. 

“ That I quite believe,” said her sister-in-law. “ But it is just 
that kind of sentiment in you which will forever prevent your 
having influence. You are too lofty; you do not stoop and see 
the threads in the dust that guide men.” 

“For thirteen centuries the forest has been untouched,” 
answered Vere. 

It was an outrage that she could not forgive. 

When she first met the Duchess of Mull after her marriage, 
Fuschia Leach, translated into tier Grace, said across a drawing- 
room, “Vera, I am going to dig for that coal. I guess we’ll live 
to make a pile that way.” Vere deigned to give no answer, un- 
less a quick, angry flush, and the instant turning of her back on 
the new duchess, could be called one. The young duke sat 
between them, awed, awkward, and ashamed. 

“ I will never forgive it,” his cousin said to him later. “ I will 
never forgive it. She knows no better because she was born so; 
but you!” 

He muttered a commonplace about waste of mineral wealth, 
and felt a poor creature. 

“ I think you’re quite right to dig,” said Lady Dolly in his ear, 
to console him, — “ quite right to dig; why not? I dare say your 
wife will make your fortune, and I am sure she ought if she can, 
to compensate for her papa, who helps people to * liquor up,’ and 
her brothers, who are in the pig-killing trade, pig-killing by 
machinery; I’ve seen a picture of it in the papers; the pigs go 
down a gangway, as we do on to the Channel steamers, and they 
come up hams and sausages. Won't you have the pig-killers 
over? They would be quite dans le metier at Hurlingham. Of 
course she tells you to dig, and you do it. Good husbands always 
do what they’re told.” 

For Lady Dolly detested all the Herberts, and had no mercy 
whatever on any one of them; and, in her way, she was a haughty 
little woman, and, though she was shrewd enough to see that in 


MOTH'S 


1^1 

foer day aristocracy to be popular must pretend to be democratic, 
she did not* relish any more than any other member of that great 
family the connection of its head with the pig-killing brothers 
out West. 

Yet, on the whole, she made herself pleasant to the new duch- 
ess, discerning that the lovely Fuschia possessed in reserve an im- 
mense retaliating power of being “ nasty ” were she displeased, so 
that sensible Lady Dolly even went the length of doing what all 
the rest of the Mull family flatly refused to do; she presented her 
piece “ on her marriage.” 

And Her Grace, who. on her first girlish presentation, when 
she had first come over “the pickle field,” had confessed herself 
“flustered,” was on this second occasion perfectly equal to it, 
carrying her feathers as if she had been born with them on her 
head, and bending her bright cheeks over a bouquet in such a 
manner that all London dropped at her feet. “ If Sam and Saul 
could see me,” thought the American beauty, hiding a grin with 
her roses, her memory reverting to the big brothers, at that 
moment standing above a great tank of pig’s blood, counting the 
“ dead ’uns” as they were cast in the caldrons. 

“It is so very extraordinary. I suppose it is because she is so 
dreadfully odd,” said Lady Dolly of her daughter to Lady Stoat 
that spring, on her return from spending Easter in Paris. “ But 
when we think she has everything she can possibly wish for, 
that when she goes down the Bois really nobody else is looked at, 
that he has actually bought the Roc’s egg for her — really, really, 
it is flying in the face of Providence for her not to be happier 
than she is. I am sure if at her age I might have spent ten 
thousand pounds a season on my gowns, I should have been in 
heaven if they had married me to a Caff re.” 

“I think you never did your dear child justice,” said Lady 
Stoat, gently. “No, I must say you never did. She is very 
steadfast, you know, and quite out of the common, and not in 
the least vulgar. Now, if you won’t mind my saying it — be- 
cause X am sure you do enjoy yourself, but then you are such a 
dear, enjouee good-natured little creature that you accommodate 
yourself to anything, — to enjoy the present generation one must 
be a little vulgar. I am an old woman, you know, and look on 
and see things, and the whole note of this thing is vulgar even 
when it is at its very best. It has been so ever since the Second 
Empire.” 

“ The dear Second Empire; you never were just to it!” said 
Lady Dolly, with the tears almost rising to her eyes at the 
thought of all she had used to enjoy in it. 

“ It was the apotheosis of the vulgar— of the sort of blague and 
shamelessness which made De Morny put an Hortensia on his 
carriage panels,” said Lady Stoat, calmly. “To have that sort 
of epoch in an age is like having skunk fur on r your clothes; the 
taint never goes away, and it even gets on to your lace and your 
cachemires. I am afraid our grandchildren will smell the 
Second Empire far away into the twentieth century, and be the 
worse for it.” 

“X dare say there will have been a fourth and a fifth by then.” 


154 


MOTHS 


“Collapsed wind-bags, I dare say. The richest soil always 
bears the rankest mushrooms. France is always bearing mush 
rooms. It is a pity. But what I meant was that your Vere has 
not got the taint of it at all: I fancy she scarcely cares at all 
about that famous diamond, unless it be for its historical associ- 
ations. I am quite sure she doesn’t enjoy being stared at; and I 
think she very heartily dislikes having her beauty written about 
in newspapers, as if she were a mare of Lord Falmouth’s or 
a cow of Lady Piggot’s; she is not Second Empire, that’s all.” 

“ Then you mean to say I am vulgar !” said Lady Dolly, with 
some tartness. 

Lady Stoat smiled, a deprecating smile, that disarmed all suf- 
ferers, who without it might have resented her honeyed cruel- 
ties. 

“ My dear, I never say rude things; but, if you wish me to be 
sincere, I confess I think everybody is a little vulgar now, except 
old women like me, who adhered to the Faubourg while you 
all were dancing and changing your dresses seven times a day at 
Saint Cloud. There is a sort of vulgarity in the air; it-is difficult 
to escape imbibing it; there is too^ little reticence, there is too 
much tearing about; men are not well mannered, and women 
are too solicitous to please, and too indifferent how far they 
stoop in pleasing. It may be the fault of steam; it may be the 
fault of smoking; it may come from that flood of new people of 
whom ‘ L’Etrangere ’ is the scarcely exaggerated sample; but, 
whatever it comes from, there it is — a vulgarity that taints 
everything, courts and cabinets as well as society. Your daugh- 
ter somehow or other has escaped it, and so you find her odd, 
and the world thinks her stiff. She is neither; but no dignified 
long descended point-lace, you know, will ever let itself be 
twisted and whirled into a cascade and a fouillis like your Bre- 
tonned lace th&t is just the fashion of the hour and worth nothing. 
I admire your Yere very greatly; she always makes me think of 
those dear old stately hotels with their grand gardens in which 
I saw, in my girlhood, the women who, in theirs, had known 
France before ’80. Those hotels and their gardens are gone, most 
of them, and there are stucco and gilt paint in their places. And 
there are people who think that a gain. I am not one of them.” 

“My sweetest Adine,” said Vere’s mother, pettishly, “if you 
admire my child so much, why did you persuade her to marry 
Sergius Zouroff?” 

“To please you, dear,” said Lady Stoat, with a glance that 
cowed Lady Dolly. “I thought she would adorn the position; 
she does adorn it. It is good to see a gentlewoman of the old 
type in a high place, especially when she is young. When we 
are older, they don’t listen much; they throw against us the 
laudator tempori acti : they think we are disappointed or em- 
bittered. It is good to see a young woman to whom men still 
have to bow, as they bow to quc< Ls, and before whom they do 
not dare to talk the langue verte. Sue ought to have a great deal 
of influence.” 

“She has none — none whatever. She never will have any,’' 
said Lady Dolly, with a sort of triumph, and added, with the 


MOTHS. 


155 


sagacity that sometimes shines out in silly people, “ You never 
influence people if you don’t like the things they like; you 
always look what the boys call a prig. Women hate Vere, per- 
fectly hate her, and yet I am quite sure she never did anything 
to any one of them*; for, in her cold way, she is very good- 
natured. But then she spoils her kind things; the way she does 
them annoys people. Last winter, while she was at Nice, Olga 
Zwetchine— you know her, the handsome one, her husband was 
in the embassy over here some time ago — utterly ruined herself 
at play, pledged everything she possessed, and* was desperate; 
she had borrowed Heaven knows what., and lost it all. She went 
and told Vera. Vera gave her a heap of money sans se faire 
prier , and then ran her pen through the Zwetchine’s name on 
her visiting-list. Zouroff was furious, 4 Let the woman be 
ruined,’ he said; ‘ what was it to you? fbut go on receiving her; 
she is an ex-ambassadress; she will hate you all your life.’ Now 
what do you call that?” 

“ My friends of the old faubourg would have done the same, 
said Lady Stoat, “ only they would have done it without giving 
the money.” 

“I can’t imagine why she did give it,” said Lady Dolly. “I 
believe she would give to anybody— to Noisette herself, if the 
creature were in want.” 

“ She probably knows nothing at all about Noisette.” 

“Oh, yes, she does. For the Zwetchine, as soon as she had 
got the money safe, wrote all about that woman to her, and 
every other horrid thing she could think of, too, to show her 
gratitude, she said. Gratitude is always such an unpleasant 
quality, you know; there is always a grudge behind it.” 

“And what did she say, or do, about Noisette?” 

“Nothing; nothing at all. I should never have heard of it, 
only she tore the Zwetchine letters up, and her maid collected 
them and pieced them together, and told my maid; you know 
wfcat maids are. I never have any confidence from Vera. I 
should never dare to say a syllable to her.” 

“Very wise of her; very dignified, not to make a scene. So 
unlike people nowadays, too, when they all seem to think it a 
positive pleasure to get into the law-courts and newspapers.” 

“No; she didn’t do anything. And now I come to think of 
it,” said Lady Dolly, with a sudden inspiration towards truthful- 
ness, “she struck off the Zwetchine’s name after that letter, very 
likely, and I dare say never told Zouroff she had had it, for she 

is very proud, and very silent, dreadfully so.” 

“ She seems to me verv sensible,” said Lady Stoat. 1 wish 
my Gwendolen were like her. It is all I can do to keep her from 
rushing to the lawyers about Birk.” 

i “ Vera is ice,” said Lady Dolly. . , ’ , . ... 

“ And how desirable that is — how safe! said Lady Stoat, with 
a sigh of envy and self-pity, for her daughter, Lady Birkenhead, 
gave her trouble despite the perfect education that daughter had 
received 

“ Certainly safe, so long as it lasts, but not at all popular,” ea^J 


156 


MOTHS. 


Lady Dolly, with some impatience. “ They call her the EdeV 
weiss in Paris. Of course it means that she is quite inaccessible, 
If she were inaccessible in the right way, it might be all very well, 
though the time’s gone by for it, and it’s always stiff, and nobody 
is stiff nowadays; still, it might answer if she were only just ex- 
clusive, and not— not— so very rude all round.” 

“ She is never rude; she is cold.” 

‘'It comes to the same tiling,” said Lady Dolly, who hated to 
be contradicted. Everybody sees that they bore her, and peo- 
ple hate you if they think they bore you; it isn’t that they care 
about you, but they fancy you find them stupid. Now, isn’t the 
most popular woman in all Europe that creature I detest, Fuschia 
Mull? Will you tell me anybody so praised, so petted, so sought 
after, so raved about? Because she’s a duchess? Oh, my love, 
no! You may be a duchess, and you may be a nobody outside 
your own county, just as that horrid old cat up at Bulmer has al- 
ways been. Oh, that ha s nothing to do with it. She is so popu- 
lar because everybody delights her and everything is fun to her. 
She’s as sharp as a needle but she’s as gay as a lark. I hate her, 
but you can’t be dull where she is. You know the prince always 
calls her ‘Pick-me-up.’ At that fancy fair for the poor Wallacks 
— whoever the poor Wallacks may be — the whole world was 
there. Vera had a stall: she loaded it with beautiful things, 
things much too good, and sat by it, looking like a very grand 
portrait of Mignard’s. She was superb, exquisite, and she had a 
bower of orchids, and a carved ivory chair from Hindostan. 
People flocked up by the hundreds, called out about her beauty, 
and — went away. She looked so still, so tired, so contemptuous. 
A very little way off was Fuschia Mull, selling vile tea and tea- 
cakes and two-penny cigarettes. My dear, the whole world 
surged round that stall as if it were mad. Certainly she had a 
lovely Louis Treize hat on, and a delicious dress, gold brocade 
with a violet velvet long waistcoat. Her execrable tea sold for a 
sovereign a cup, and when she kissed her cigarettes they went 
for five pounds each! Zouroff went up and told his wife: ‘A 
brioche there fetches more than your Saxe, and your Sevres, and 
your orchids,’ he said. ‘ You don’t tempt the people; you frighten 
them.’ Then Vera looked at him with that way — she has such 
la freezing way — and only said, ‘ Would you wish ma to kiss the 
orchids?’ Zouroff laughed. ‘Well, no; you don’t do for this 
thing, I see; you don’t know how to make yourself cheap.’ Now, 
I think he hit exactly on what I mean. To be liked nowadays 
you must make yourself cheap. If you want to sell your cigar 
you must kiss it.” 

“But suppose she has no cigars she wants to sell?” 

“ You mean she has a great position and need care for no- 
body ? That is all very well. But if she ever come to grief, see 
how they will turn and take it out of her!” 

“ I never said she was wise not to be polite,” pleaded Lady 
Stoat. “But as to ‘coming to grief,’ as you say, that is impos- 
sible. She will always sit in that ivory chair.” 

Baid^ Lady 'DojSJ? #R G never knows, and she is odd. If any day 


MOTHS. 


157 


3he get very angry with Zouroff, she is the sort of temper to go 
out of his house in her shift and leave everything behind her.” 

“What a picture?” said Lady Stoat, with a shudder. 

Nothing appalled Lady Stoat like the idea of any one being 
wrought upon to do anything violent. She would never admit 
that there could ever be any reason for it, or excuse. 

She had been an admirable wife to a bad husband herself, and 
she could not conceive any woman not considering her position 
before all such pettier matters as emotions and wrongs. 

When her daughter, who was of an impetuous disposition, 
which even the perfect training she had received had not sub- 
dued, would come to her in rage and tears because of the drunk- 
enness or because of the open infidelities of the titled Tony 
Lumpkin that she had wedded, Lady Stoat soothed her, but 
hardly sympathized. “ Lead your own fife, my love, and don’t 
worry,” she would say. “Nothing can unmake your position, 
and no one, except yourself.” When her daughter passionately 
protested that position was not all that a woman wanted at 
twenty years old, and with a heart not all trained out of her, 
Lady Stoat would feel seriously annoyed and injured. “ You 
forget your position,” she would reply. “Pray, pray do not 
jeopardize your position. Let your husband go to music-halls 
and creatures if he must: it is very sad, certainly very sad. But 
it only hurts him; it cannot affect your position.” Further than 
that the light she possessed could not take her. 

She would not have been disposed to quarrel with the Princess 
Zouroff, as her own mother did, for not playing the fool at fancy 
fairs, but she would have thought it horrible, inexcusable, if, 
under the pressure of any wrong, the affront of infidelity, she 
had — in Lady Dolly’s figure of speech — left her husband’s house 
in her shift. 

“ Never lose your position,” would have been the text that 
Lady Stoat would have written in letters of gold for all young 
wives to read, and it was the text on which all her sermons were 
preached. 

Position was the only thing that, like old wine or oak furniture, 
improved with years. If you had a good position at twenty, at 
forty you might be a power in the land. What else would wear 
like that? Not love, certainly, which indeed at all times Lady 
Stoat was disposed to regard as a malady — a green-sickness, in- 
evitable, but, to on-lookers, very irritating in its delirious non- 
sense. 

It was neither mere rank nor mere riches that Lady Stoat con- 
sidered a great position. It was the combination of both, with a 
power — inalienable except by your own act — to give the tone to 
those around you, to exclude all who did not accord with your 
own notions; to be unattainable, untroubled, unruffled, to be a 
great .example to society; metaphorically to move through life 
with carpet always unrolled before your steps. When you had 
a position that gave you all this, if you had tact and talent 
enough to avail yourself of it, what could you by any possibility 
seed more? 


m 


MOTHS . 


Yet her own daughter, and her friend’s daughter, had this, aad 
both were dissatisfied. 

Her own daughter, to her anguish unspeakable, revolted openly 
and grew vulgar — even grew vulgar; went on the boxes of the 
four-in-hand- men’s coaches, shot and hunted, played in amateur 
performances before London audiences far from choice, bad even 
been seen at the Crystal Palace, had “ loud ” costumes with won- 
derful waistcoats, and had always a crowd of young men 
wherever she went. Lady Stoat honestly would sooner have 
seen her in her grave. 

The Princess Zouroff, who had the very perfection of manner 
even if she offended people, who knew of her husband’s infidel- 
ities and said nothing, went coldly and serenely through the 
world, taking no pleasure in it, perhaps, but giving it no power 
to breathe a breath against her. 

“Why was she not my child?” sighed Lady Stoat sadly. 

If Lady Stoat could have seen into the soul of Yere, she would 
have found as little there with which she could have sympathized 
as she found in her own daughter’s tastes for the stage, the drag, 
and the loud waistcoats. 

She could not imagine the price at which Yere’s composure 
was attained, the cost at which that perfect manner, which she 
admired, was kept unruffled by a sigh or frown. She could not 
tell that this young life was one of perpetual suffering, of ex- 
hausting effort to keep hold on the old faiths and the old prin- 
ciples of childhood amidst a world which has cast out faith as 
©ld-fashioned and foolish and regards a principle as an affront 
and an ill-nature. Her own society found the young Princess 
Yera very cold, unsympathetic, strange; she was chill about 
fashionable good works, and her grand eyes had a look in them, 
stern in its sadness, which frightened away both courtiers and 
enemies. The verdict upon her was that she was unamiable. 

The world did not understand her. 

“ The poor you have always with you,” had been an injunction 
that, in the days of her childhood, she had been taught to hold 
sacred. 

“ The poor you have always with you,” she said to a bevy of 
'great ladies once. “ Christ said so. You profess to follow Christ. 
'How have you the poor with you? The back of their garret, the 
roof of their hovel, touches the wall of your palace, and the wall 
is thick. You have dissipations, spectacles, diversions that you call 
charities; you have a tombola for a famine, you have a dramatic 
performance for a flood, you have a concert for a fire, you have 
a fancy fair for a leprosy. Do you never think how horrible it 
is, that mockery of woe? Do you ever wonder at revolutions? 
Why do you not say honestly that you care nothing? You do 
care nothing. The poor might forgive the avowal of indifference; 
they will never forgive the insult of affected pity.” 

Then the ladies who heard were scandalized, and went to their 
priests and were ^comforted, and would not have this young saint 
’ to them as Chrysostom preached to the ladies of Constan- 



MOTHS. m 

But Ver© had been reared in tender thoughtfulness for the poor. 
Her grandmother, stern to all others, to the poor was tender. 

‘ Put your second frock on for the queen, if you like,” she 
would say to the child, “but to the poor go in your best clothes, 
or they will feel hurt.” Vere never forgot what was meant in 
that bidding. Charity in various guises is an intruder the poor 
see often; but courtesy and delicacy are visitants with which they 
.are seldom honored . * ~ 

it is very "difficult for a woman who is young and very rich not 
to be deceived very often, and many an impostor, no doubt, 
played his tricks upon her. But she was clear-sighted and much 
in earnest, and found many whose needs were terrible and whose 
lives were noble. The poor of Paris are suspicious, resentful, and 
apt to be sullen in their independence; but they are often also 
serious and intelligent, tender of heart, and gay of spirit. Some 
of them she grew to care for very much, and many of them for- 
gave her for being an aristocrat and welcomed her for her loveli- 
ness and her sympathy. As for herself, she sometimes felt that 
the only reality life had for her was when she went up to tnose 
damp chill attics in the metal roofs, and spoke with those 
whose bread was bitterness and whose cup was sorrow. Her 
husband, with some contempt, told her she grew like Saint 
Elizabeth of Thuringia; but he did not forbid her doing as 
she pleased. If she were present to drive in the Bois or ride 
there before sunset, and afterward went to dinner, or ball, or re- 
ception, as the engagements of the night might require, he did 
not exact any more account of her time or ask how her mornings 
were spent. 

“ You leave Vere too much alone, terribly too much,” said his 
sister to him once. 

He stared, then laughed. 

“ Alone? a woman of her rank is never alone. Not a whit more 
than queens are!” 

“ I mean you are not with her; you never ask what she does all 
the day.” 

“ I suppose her early hours are given to her tailor and her 
milliner, and the latter ones to morning visits,” he answered, 
with a yawn. “ It does not matter what she does. She is a fool 
in many things, but she will not abuse liberty.” 

For, though he had never believed in any woman, he did be- 
lieve in his wife. 

u She will not abuse it yet; no,” thought Madame Nelaguina. 
‘ No, not yet, whilst she is still under the influence of her child- 
ish faiths and her fear of God. But after— after five, six, seven 
years of the world, of this world into which you have cast her 
without any armor of love to protect her — how will it be then? 
It will not be men’s fault if she misuses her liberty; and, assuredly, 
it will not be women’s. We corrupt each other more than men 
corrupt us.” 

Aloud the Princess Nelaguine merely said, “You will alln v ' r 
her to be friends with Jeanne Sonnaz?” 

Zouroff laughed again, and frowned. 


,60 MOTHS. 

** All women in the same set see one another day and nights 
Who is to help that?” 

“j;But ” 

“ Be reasonable,” he said, roughly. “How can I say to my 
wife, ‘ Do not receive the Duchess de Sonnaz?’ All Paris would 
be convulsed, and Jeanne herself a demoniac. Good heavens! 
Where do you get all these new scruples? Is it your contact with 
Vera?” 

“Your contact with her does not teach them to you,” said his 
sister, coldly. “ Oh, our world is vile enough, that I know well: 
but somewhere or other I think it might keep a little conscience, 
for exceptional circumstances, and so might you.” 

“ Do not talk nonsense. I cannot tell Jeanne not to know my 
wife, or my wife not to know Jeanne. They must take their 
chance; there is nothing exceptional ; every man does the 
same.” 

“ Yes, we are very indecent,” said Madame Nelaguine, quietly. 
“ We do not admit it, but we are.” 

Her brother shrugged his shoulders to express at once acquies- 
cence and indifference. 

In one of the visits that her charities led his wife to make, she 
heard, one day, a thing that touched her deeply. Her horses 
knocked down a girl of fifteen who was crossing the Avenue du 
Bois de Boulogne. The girl was not hurt, though frightened. She 
was taken into the Hotel Zouroff, and Yere returned to the house 
to attend to her. As it proved, the child, when the faintness of 
her terror had passed, declared herself only a little bruised, 
smiled and thankedpier, and said she would go home; she wanted 
nothing. She was a freckled, ugly, bright-looking little thing, 
and was carrying some of those artificial flowers with which so 
many girls of Paris gain their daily bread. Her name was Felicie 
Martin, and she was the only child of her father, and her mother 
was dead. 

The following day the quiet little coupe that took Yere on her 
morning errands f omid its way into a narrow but decent street in 
the Batignolles, and the Princess' Zouroff inquired for the Sieur 
Martin. 

Yere bade her men wait below, and went up the stairs to the 
third floor. The house was neat, and was let to respectable peo- 
ple of the higher class of workers. In her own world she was 
very proud, but it was not the pride that offends the working 
classes, because it is dignity, and not arrogance, and is simple and 
natural, thinking nothing of rank, though much of race, and far 
more still of character. 

“May I come in?” she said, in her clear voice, which had 
always so sad an accent in it, but for the poor was never cold. 

“Will you allow me to make myself quite sure that your 
daughter is none the worse for that accident, and tell you my- 
Belf how very sorry I was? Russian coachmen are always so 
reckless.” 

i “ But, madame, it is too much honor!” said a little, fair man 
who rose on her entrance, but did not move forward. “ Forgive 
me, madame, you are as beautiful as you are good; so I have 


MOTHS. 


161 


heardjfrom my child; but, alas! I cannot have the joy to see 
such sunlight in my room. Madame will pardon me — I am 
blind.” 

“ Blind?” — the word always strikes a chill to those who hear it; 
it is not a very rare calamity, but it is the one of all others which 
most touches bystanders and is most quickly realized. He was 
a happy-looking little man, nevertheless, though his blue eyes 
were without light in them, gazing into space unconsciously; the 
room was clean, and gay, and sweet-smelling, with some pretty 
vases and prints and other simple ornaments, and in the case- 
ment some geraniums and heliotrope. 

“Yes, I am blind,” he said, cheerfully. “Will Madame la 
Princesse kindly be seated? My child is at her workshop. She 
will be so proud and glad. She has talked of nothing but 
madame ever since yesl erday. Madame’s beauty, madame’s good- 
ness — ah, yes, the mercy of it! I am always afraid for my child 
in the streets, but she is not afraid for herself; she is little, but 
she is brave. It is too much kindness for Madame la Princesse to 
have come up all this hight, but madame is good; one hears it in 
her voice. Yes, my child makes flowers for the great Maison Jus- 
tine. Our angel did that for us. She is my only child, yes. 
Her dear mother died at her birth. I was fourth clarionet at the 
Opera Comique at that time.” 

“ But you can play still?” 

“ Ah, no, madame. My right arm is paralyzed. It was one 
day in the forest at Vincennes. Felicie was ten years old. I 
thought to give her a Sunday in the wood. It was in May. We 
were very happy, she and I, running after each other, and pulling 
the hawthorn when no one looked. All in a moment a great 
storm came up and burst over us where we were in the midst of the 
great trees. The lightning struck my eyes and my right shoul- 
der. Ah, the poor, poor child! . . But madame must excuse me; 
I am tiresome ” 

“ It interests me; go on.” 

“ I fell into great misery, madame. That is all. No hospital 
could help me. The sight was gone, and my power to use my 
right arm was gone, too. I could not even play my clarionet in 
the streets, as blind men do. I had saved a little, but not much. 
Musicians do not save, any more than painters. I had never 
earned very much, either. I grew very, very poor. I began to 
despair. I had to leave my lodging, my pretty little rooms 
where the child was born and where my wife had died; I went 
lower and lower, I grew more and more wretched — a blind, use- 
less man with a little daughter. And I had no friends; no one; 
because, myself, I came from Alsace, and the brother I had there 
was dead, and our parents, too, had been dead long, long before: 
they had been farmers. Madame, I saw no hope at all. I had not 
a hope on earth, and Felicie was such a little thing she could do 
nothing. But I fatigue madame?” 

Indeed, no. Pray go on, and tell me how it is that you are 
bo tranquil now.” 

“ I am more than tranquil; I am happy, princess. That is his 
doing. My old employers all forgot me. They had so much to 


1(2 


MOTHS. 


think of; it was natural. I was nobody. There were hundred* 
and thousands could play as well as I had ever played. One day, 
when I was standing in the cold, hungry, with my little girl 
hungry, too, I heard them saying how the young singer Correze 
had been engaged at fifty thousand francs a night for the season. 
I went home and I made the child write a letter to the young 
man. I told him what had happened to me, and I said, ‘ You 
are young and famous, and gold rains on you like dew in mid- 
summer; will you remember that we are very wretched? If you 
said a word to my old directors — you — they would think of me.* 
I sent the letter. I had often played in the orchestra when the 
young man was first turning the heads of all Paris. I knew he 
was gay and careless; I had not much hope.” 

“Well?” Her voice had grown soft and eager; the man was 
blind, and could not see the flush upon her face. 1 

“ Well, a day or two went by, and I thought the letter waa 
gone in the dust. Then he came to me — he himself — Correze. 
I knew his perfect voice as I heard it on the stairs. You can 
never forget it once you have heard. He had a secretary even 
then, but he had not left my letter to the secretary. He came 
like the angel Raphael whose name he bears.” 

Yere’s eyes filled: she thought of the white cliffs by the sea, of 
the sweet-brier hedge, and the song of the thrush. 

“ But I tire madame,” said the blind man. “ He came like an 
angel. There is no more to be said. He made believe to get me 
a pension from the opera, but I have always thought that it is 
his own money, though he will not own to it; and, as my child 
had a talent for flower-making, he had her taught the trade, and 
got her. employed, later on, by the Maison Justine. He sent me 
that china, and he sends me those flowers, and he comes, some- 
times, himself. He has sung here — here ! — only just to make my 
darkness lighter. And I am not the only one^ madame. There 
are many, many, many who, if they ever say their prayers, 
should never forget Correze.” 

Yere was silent, because her voice failed her. 

“You have heard Correze, madame, of course, many times?” 
asked the blind man. “Ah, they say he has no religion and is 
careless as the butterflies are: tome he has been as the angels. 
I should have been in Bicetre or in my grave but for him.” 

The girl at that moment entered. 

“Felicie,” said the Sieur Martin, “ give the princess a piece of 
heliotrope. Oh, she has forests of heliotrope in her conserva- 
tories, that I am sure, but she will accept it: it is the flower 
Correze.” 

Vere took it and put it amidst the old lace at her breast. 

“You have Felicie Martin among your girls, I think?” said 
Vere to the head of the Maison Justine a little later. 

The principal of that fashionable house, a handsome and clever 
■woman, assented. 

“ Then let her make some flowers for me,” added Yere. Ci Any 
flowers will do. Only will you permit m,e to pay her through 
you very well for them? much better for them than they are 
Worth?” 


moths: 


163 


e v< Madame la Princesse,” said the other, with a smile, 44 the 
tittle Martin cannot make such flowers as you would wean I 
employ her, but I never use her flowers, never. I have to de- 
ceive her; it would break her heart if she knew that I bum them 
all. The poor child is willing, but she is very clumsy. She can- 
not help it. Madame will understand it is a secret of my house, 
a very little harmless secret, like a little mouse. Correze — 
madame knows whom I mean, the great singer? — Correze came 
to me one day with his wonderful smile, and he said : ‘ There is 
a blind man, and he has a little girl who wants to make flowers. 
Will you have her taugbt, madame, and allow me to pay 
for her lessons?’ I allowed him. Six months afterward I said, 
4 M. Correze, it is all of no use. The child w clumsy. When once 
they have fingers like hers it is of no use, 9 Then he laughed. 4 It 
ought to be difficult to make artificial flowers. I wish it were 
impossible. It is a blashphemy. But I want to make the girl 
believe she earns money. Will you employ her, burn the flowers, 
draw the money from my account at Rothschild’s?’ And I did 
it to please him, and I do it still; poor little clumsy ugly thing 
that she is, she fancies she works for the Maison Justine! It is 
compromising to me. I said so to M. Correze. He laughed, and 
said to me, 4 Ma chere, when it is a question of a blind man and a 
child we must even be compromised, which, no doubt, is very 
terrible.’ He is always so gay, M. Correze, and so good. If the 
child were Venus he would never take advantage of maintaining 
her, never, madame. Ah, he is an angel, that beautiful Correze. 
And he can laugh like a boy; it does one good to hear his laugh. 
It is so sweet. My poor Justine used to say to me, 4 Marie, hypo- 
crites weep, and you cannot tell their tears from those saints; 
but no bad man ever laughed sweetly yet.’ And it is true, very 
true: Madame la Princesse will forgive my garrulity.” 

When she went down to her carriage the world did not seem 
so dark. 

There was beauty in it, as there were those flowers blooming in 
that common street. The little picture of the father and daugh- 
ter, serene and joyous in their humble chamber, in the midst of 
the gay, wild, ferocious riot of Paris, seemed like a little root of 
daisies blooming white amidst a battle-field. 

That night she went to her box at the Grand Opera, and.sat as 
far in the shadow as she could, and .listened to Correze in the 
part of Gennaro. 

“ He does not forget that blind man,” she thought. 44 Does he 
ever remember me?” 

For she could never tell. 

From the time she had entered Paris she had longed, yet dread- 
ed, to meet, face to face, Correze. 

She saw him constantly in the street, in the Bois, in society, 
but he never approached her; she never once could be even sure 
that he recognized or remembered her. She heard people say 
that Correze was more difficult of access, more disinclined to ac- 
cept the worship of society, than he had been before, but she 
could not tell what his motive might be; she could not believe 
that she had any share in his thoughts. His eyes never one© 


164 


MOTHS. 


met hers but what they glanced away again rapidly and without 
any gleam of recognition. Again and again in those great salons 
where he was a petted idol she was close beside him, but she 
could never tell that he remembered her. . Perhaps his life was 
so full, she thought; after all, what was one summer morning, 
that he should cherish its memory? 

Often, in the conversation that went on around her, she heard 
his successes, his inconstancies, his passions of the past, slight or _ 
great, alluded to, laughed over, or begrudged. Often, also, she 
heard of other things — of some great generosity to a rival, some 
great aid to an aspirant of his art, some magnificent gift to a col- 
lege made by the famous singer; or, on the other hand, of some 
captiousness as of a too spoilt child, some wayward caprice 
shown to the powers of the state by the powers of genius, some 
brilliant lavishness of entertainment or of fancy. When she 
heard these tilings, her heart would beat, her color would change; 
they hurt her, she could not have told why. 

Meantime, the one solace of her life was to see his genius and 
its triumphs, its plenitude and its perfect flower. Her box at the 
Grand Opera was the only one of the privileges of her position 
which gave her pleasure. Her knowledge of rntisic was deep and 
had been carefully cultured, and her well-known love for it made 
her devotion to the opera pass unremarked. Seldom could the 
many engagements made for her let her hear any one opera from 
its overture to the close; but few nights passed without her being 
in her place, sitting as far in the shadow as she could, to hear at 
least one actor more of “ Fidelio,” of “ Lucia,” of the “ Prophete,” 
of the “ Zauberflote,” of “Faust,” or of “II Trovatore.” She 
never knew or guessed that the singer watched for her fair-haired 
head amidst the crowded house, as a lover watches for the 
rising of the evening planet that shall light him to his love. 

She saw him in the distance a dozen times a week; she saw 
him, not seldom, at the receptions of great houses, but she never 
was near enough to him to be sure whether he had really forgot- 
ten her or whether he had only affected oblivion. 

Correze, for his own part, avoided society as much as he could, 
and alleged that to sing twice or three times a week was as much 
as his strength would allow him to do, if he wished to be honest 
and give his best to his impresario. But he was too popular, too 
much missed when absent, and too great a favorite with great 
ladies to find retirement in the midst of Paris possible; so that 
again and again it was his fortune to seo the child he had sung to 
on the Norman cliff s announced to the titled crowds as Madame 
la Princesse Zouroff. It always hurt him. On the other hand, 
he was always glad when, half hidden behind some huge fan or 
gigantic bouquet, he could see the fair head of Yere in the opera- 
house. 

When he sang he sang to her. 

“ How is it you do not know Princess Vera,*’ said many of his 
friends to him; for he never asked to be presented to her. 

“ I think she would not care to know an artist,” he would say. 

“ Why should she? She is at the height of fame and fortune anq 
©harm and beauty; what would she want with the homage of ^ 


MOTHS. 


165 


singing-mime? She is very exquisite; but, you know, I have my 
pride; la probite des pauvres, et la grandeur des rois; I never risk 
a rebuff.” 

And he said it so lightly that his friends believed him, and be- 
lieved that he had a fit of that reserve which very often made 
him haughtier and more difficult to persuade than any Roi So- 
led of the lyric stage had ever been. 

“I am very shy,” he would say sometimes, and everybody 
would laugh at him. Yet, in a way, it was true: he had many 
sensitive fancies, and all in his temperament that was tender, 
spiritual, and romantic had centered itself in that innocent emo- 
tion which had never been love, which was as fantastic as 
Dante’s, and almost as baseless as Keats’, and was therefore all 
the more dear to him because so unlike the too easy and too ma- 
terial passions which had been his portion in youth. 

“ It can do her no harm,” he would think, “ and it goes with 
me like the angel that the poets write of, that keeps the door of 
the soul.” 

It was a phantasy, he told himself; but then the natural food 
of artists was phantasies of all kinds; and so this tenderness, this 
regret, went with him always through the gay motley of his 
changeful days, as the golden curl of some lost love or some dead 
child may lie next the heart of a man all the while that ho 
laughs, and talks, and dines, and drives, and jests, and yawns in 
the midst of the world. 

“ It can do her no harm,” he said; and so he never let his eyes 
meet hers, and she could never tell whether he ever remembered 
that Vera Zouroff had once been Vere Herbert. 

And the weeks and the months rolled on their course, and 
Correze was always the Roi Soleil of his time, and Vere became 
yet of greater beauty, as her face and form reached their full 
perfection. Her portraits by great painters, her busts by great 
sculptors, her costumes by great artists, were the themes of the 
public press; the streets were filled to see her go by in the 
pleasure-capital of the world; among her diamonds the famous 
jewel of tragic memories and historic repute that was called the 
Roc’s egg shone on her white breast as if she had plucked a 
planet from the skies. No day passed but fresh treasures in old 
jewels, old wares, old gold and silver from the sales of the Hotel 
Drouot were poured into her rooms with all the delicate charm 
about them that comes from history and tradition. Had she any 
whim, she could indulge it; any taste, she could gratify it; any 
fancy, she could execute it; and yet, one day, when she saw a 
picture in the Salon of a slave-girl standing with rope-bound 
wrists and fettered ankles amidst the lustrous stuffs and gems of 
the harem, surrounded by open coffers and the glittering stones 
and chains of gold in which her captors were about to array her 
nude and trembling limbs, she looked long at it, and said to the 
master of Oriental art who had painted it, “Did you need to go 
to the East for that?” 

,She bought the picture, and had it hung in her bedchamber in 
Paris — where it looked strange and startling against the pink 
taffetas and the silver embroideries of the wall 


;66 


MOTHS. 


“ That is not in your usual good taste,” said her husband, find* 
ing that the painting ill agreed with the decorations of the 
room. 

Vere looked at him, and answered, “It suits any one of my 
rooms.” 

He did not think enough of the matter to understand; the pict- 
ure hung there amidst the silver Cupids and the embroidered 
Epple-blossoms of the wall. 

“ A painful picture, a horrible picture, like all of Gerome’s,” 
said her mother before it once, 

A very cold smile came on Vere’s mouth. 

“ Yes,” she said, simply; “ we have no degradation like that in 
Europe, have we?” 

Lady Dolly colored, turned away, and asked if Fantin had de- 
signed those charming wreaths of apple-blossoms and Amorini. 

But it was very seldom that the bitterness and scorn and 
shame that were in her found any such expression as in the pur- 
chase of the “Slave for the Harem.” She was almost always 
quite tranquil and very patient under the heavy burden of her 
days. 

All the bitterness and humiliation of her heart she choked 
down into silence, and she continued to live as she had done 
hitherto, without sympathy and in an utter mental isolation. She 
felt that all she had been taught to respect was ridiculous in the 
eyes of those who surrounded her; she saw that all she had been 
accustomed to hold in horror as sin made subject for jest and for 
intrigue; she saw that all around her, whilst too polite to deride 
the belief and the principles that guided her, yet regarded them 
as the cobwebs and chimeras of childhood; she saw that the 
women of her world, though they clung to priests, and, in a way, 
feared an offended heaven — when they recollected it— yet were 
as absolutely without moral fiber and mental cleanliness as any 
naked creatures of Pacific isles sacrificing to their obscene gods. 
All that she saw; but it did not change her. 

She was faithful, not because his merit claimed it, but because 
her duty made such faith the only purity left to her. She was 
loyal, not because his falseness was ever 'worthy of it, but be- 
cause her nature would not let her be other than loyal to the 
meanest thing that lived. Chastity was to her as honor to the 
gentleman, as courage to the soldier. It was not a robe embroid- 
ered and worn for mere parade, and therefore easy to be lifted 
in the dark by the first audacious hand that" ruffled it. 

“ On se console toujour s, we know,” her sister-in-law thought, 
who watched her keenly. “ Still, there is an exception now and 
then to that rule, as to any other, and she is one of those excep- 
tions. It is strange; generally the great world is like ether, or 
any other dram-drinking; tasted once, it is sought for more 
and more eagerly every time,£and ends in becoming an indispens- 
able intoxication. But nothing intoxicates her, and so nothing 
consoles her. I believe she does not care in the least for being 
one of the very few perfectly lovely women in Europe. I believe 
her beauty is almost distasteful and despicable to her, because it 
brought about her bondage; and, although it is an exaggerated 


'MOTHS. 


16? 


Way of looking at such things, she is right: she was bought, 
quite as barbarously as Gerome’s slave. Only were she anybody 
else she would be reconciled by now — or be revenged. The only 
time I ever see her look in the least happy is at the opera, and 
there she seems as if she were dreaming; and once, atSvir, when 
we were driving over the plains in the snow, and they said the 
wolves were behind us — then she looked for the moment all 
brilliancy and courage; one would have said she was wiling to 
feel the wolves’ breath on her throat. But in the world she is 
never like that. What other women find excitement to her is 
monotony. Pleasure does not please her, vanity does not exist 
in her, and intrigue does not attract her: some day love will.” 

And then Madame Nelaguine would pull the little curls of her 
perruque angrily and light her cigar, and sit down to the piano, 
and compose her nerves with Chopin. 

“As for Sergius, he deserves nothing,” she would mutter, as 
she followed the dreamy, intricate melodies of the great master. 

But then it was not for her to admit that to any one, and 
much less was itjjjfor her to admit it to his wife. Like most great 
ladies, she thought little of a sin, but she had a keen horror 
of a scandal, and she was afraid of the future, very afraid of it. 

“ If she were not a pearl, what vengeance she would take I” 
she thought again and again, when the excesses and indecencies 
of her brother’s career reached her ears. 

For she forgot that she understood those as the one most out- 
raged by them was very slow to do. 

Yere still dwelt within the citadel of [her own innocence as 
Within the ivory walls of an enchanted fortress. Little by little 
the corruption of life flowed into her and surrounded her like a 
fetid moat, but, though it approached her, it did not touch her, 
and often she did not even know that it was near. What she 
did perceive filled her with a great disgust, and her husband 
laughed at her. 

In these short months of her life in Paris she felt as though 
she had lived through centuries. Ten years in the old gray soli- 
tude gof Bulmer would not have aged her morally or mentally 
as these brief months of the riot of society had done. She had 
drunk of the cup of knowledge of good and evil, and, though 
she had drunk with sinless lips, she could not entirely escape the 
poison the cup held. 

She hated the sin of the world, she hated the sensuality, the in- 
trigue, the folly, the insincerity, the callousness of the life of so- 
ciety, yet the knowledge of it was always within her like a bitter 
taste in the mouth. 

It hurt her unceasingly; it aged her like the passing of many 
years. 

In the beginning of the time she had tried to get some threads 
of guidance, some words of counsel, from the man who was her 
husband, and knew the world so well. The answers of Sergius 
Zouroff left her with a heavier heart and a more bitter taste. 
The chill cynicism, the brutal grossness, of his experiences tore 
and hurt the delicate fibers of her moral being, as the poisons>nd 


168 


MOTHS. 


the knife of the vivisector tear and burn the sensitive nerves of 
the living organism that they mutilate. 

He did not intend to hurt her; but it fejemed to him that her 
ignorance made her ridiculous. He pulled down the veils and 
mufflers in which the vices of society mask themselves, and was 
amused to see her shrink from the nude deformity. 

His rough, bold temper had only one weakness in it: he had a 
nervous dread of being made to look absurd. He thought the in- 
nocence and coldness of Vere made him look so. 

‘ ‘ They will take me for a marl amouteux” he thought; and 
Madame de Sonnaz laughed, and told him the same thing fifty 
times a week. He began to grow impatient of his wife’s uncon- 
sciousness of all that went on around her, and enlightened her 
without scruple. 

He sat by her and laughed at Judic and at Theo, and was an- 
gry with her that she looked grave and did not laugh; he threw 
the last new sensation in realistic literature on to her table, and 
bade her read it, or she would look like a fool when others talked. 
When a royal prince praised her too warmly, and she resented 
it, he was annoyed with her. “You do not know how to take 
the world,” he said, impatiently. “It is myself that you make 
ridiculous: I do not aspire to be thought the jealous husband of 
the theatres, running about with a candle and crying, Aux 
voleurs /” 

V/hen she came to 'know of the vices of certain great ladies 
Who led the fashion and the world, she asked him if what was 
said were true. 

He laughed. 

“ Quite true; and a great deal that is never said, and that is 
worse, is as true, too.” 

“And you wish me to know them? to be friends with them?’* 
she asked, in her ignorance. 

He swore a little, and gave her a contemptuous caress, as to a 
dog that is importuning. 

“Know them? Of course; you must always know them. 
They are the leaders of society. What is their life to you or any- 
body? It is their husbands’ affair. You must be careful as to 
women’s position, but you need not trouble yourself about their 
character.” 

“ Then nothing that any one does, matters?” 

He shrugged his shoulders. “It depends on how the world 
takes it. You have a proverb in English about the man who 
may steal a horse and the man who must not look at the halter. 
The world is very capricious: it often says nothing to the horse- 
stealer, it often pillories the person that looks at the halter. You 
are not in it to redress its caprices. All you need be careful 
about is to know the right persons.” 

The people that may steal the horses?” said Vere, with the 
faint, fine smile that had no mirth in it and was too old for her 
years — the smile that alone had ever come on her lips since her 
marriage. 

“ The people that may steal the horses,” said Zouroft, with & 


MOTHS. 169 

short laugh, not needing her smile nor what seed his advice 
might sow. 

When he had left her that day, she went into her bedchamber 
and sat down before Gerome’s “Slave for the Harem.” 

“The men of the East are better than these,” she thought. 
“The men of the East do veil their women and guard them.” 

What could he say, what reproach could he make, if she learned 
her lesson from his teaching, and learned it too well for his honor? 

A note was lying on her table from a great prince, whom all 
the world of women loved to praise and languished to be praised 
hy — a note written by himself, the first initiatory phrases of an 
adoration that only asked one smile from her to become passion. 
Such power of vengeance lay for her in it as there lies power of 
destruction in the slender, jewel-like head of the snake. 

She had only to write a word— name an hour— and Sergius 
Zouroff would taste the fruit of his counsels. 

The thought, which was not temptation because it was too 
cold, glided into her mind, and, for the moment, looked almost 
sweet to her because it seemed so just — that sad, wild justice 
which is all that any revenge can be at its best. 

She took the note and let it lie on her lap — the note that com- 
promised a future king. She felt as if all her youth were dying 
in her — as if she were growing hard, and cruel, and soulless. 
What use were honor, and cleanliness, and dignity? Her hus- 
band laughed at them; the world laughed at them. Nothing 
mattered. No one cared. 

The voice of one of her maids roused her, asking, “Is there 
any answer from Madame to Monseigneur?” 

Vere lifted her eyes, like one who wakes from a feverish 
sleep. She pushed her hair back with a quick gesture, and rose. 

“No; none,” she answered, curtly; and she took the note, and 
lighted a match, and burned it. 

The slight, cold smile came on her face. 

“After all,” she thought, “there is no merit in virtue, when 
sin would disgust one. I suppose the world is right to be capri- 
cious in its award. Since it is only a matter of temperament, 
it is nothing very great to be guiltless. If one likes one’s soul 
clean, like one’s hands, it is only a question of personal taste. 
There is no right and no wrong — so they say.” 

And her eyes filled, and her heart was heavy; for, to> the 
young and noble, there is no desert so dreary to traverse as the 
vast waste of the world’s indifference. They would be strong to 
combat, they would be brave to resist; but in that sickly ^ea of 
sand they can only faint and sink and cease to struggle. 

It is harder to keep true to high laws and pure instincts in 
modern society than it was in days of martyrdom. There is 
nothing in the whole range of life so dispiriting and so unnerv- 
ing as a monotony of indifference. Active persecution and fierce 
chastisement are tonics to the nerves; but the mere weary con- 
viction that no one cares, that no one notices, that there is no 
humanity that honors, and no deity that pities, is more de- 
structive of all higher effort than any conflict with tyranny or 
With barbarism. 

yere saw, very well that if she stooped and touched the brink 


m 


MOTHS. 


of vice — if she lent her ear to amorous compliment that veiled 
dishonor, if she brought herself to the level of the world she 
lived in, women would love her better, and her husband honor 
her none the less. 

What would he care? 

Perhaps he would not have accepted absolute dishonor; but 
all the temptations that led to it he let strew her path in all the 
various guises of the times. 

That night there was a great costume ball at one of the lega- 
tions. It had been talked of for months, and was to be the most 
brilliant thing of this kind that Paris had seen for many seasons. 
All the tailors of fashion, and all the famous painters of the day, 
had alike been pressed into the service of designing the most cor- 
rect dresses of past epochs, and many dusty chronicles and min- 
iatures in vellum in old chateaux in the country and old libraries 
in the city had been disturbed, to yield information and to de- 
cide disputes. 

The Prince and Princess Zouroff were among the latest to 
arrive. He wore the dress of his ancestor in the time of Ivan II., 
a mass of sables and of jewels. She, by a whim of his own, was 
called the Ice-Spirit, and diamonds and rock crystals shone all 
over her from head to foot. Her entrance was the sensation of 
the evening; and as he heard the exclamations that awarded her 
the supreme place of beauty where half the loveliness of Europe 
had been assembled, that vanity of possession which is the basest 
side of passion revived in him, and made his sluggish pulses 
beat at once with the miser’s and the spendthrift’s pleasure. 

“Yes, you are right; she is really very beautiful,” whispered 
Jeanne de Sonnaz in his ear. “ To represent Ice it is not neces- 
sary to have chien.” 

Zouroff frowned: he was never pleased with being reminded of 
things that he said himself. 

The duchess herself had chien enough for twenty women. She 
called herself a Sorceress, and was all in red, a brilliant, poppy- 
like, flame-like, Mephistophelian red, with her famous rubies, 
and many another jewel, winking like wicked little eyes all over 
her, while a narrow Venetian mask of black hid her ugliest 
features and let her blazing eyes destroy their worlds. 

As a pageant, the great ball was gorgeous and beautiful; as a 
triumph, few women ever knew one greater than that night was 
to Vere. Yet the hours were tiresome to her. ‘When her eyes 
had once rested on the pretty picture that the splended crowd 
composed, she would willingly have gone away. She felt what 
the Easterns call an asp at her heart. The barrenness and lone- 
liness of her life weighed on her; and it was not in her nature to 
find solace in levity and consolation in homage. Others might 
do so and did do so; she could not. 

“ Madame, what can you want to be content?” said an old wit 
to her. “You have rendered every man envious and every 
woman unhappy. Surely, that is a paradise for you, from 
which you can look down/ smiling in scorn at our tears?” 

Vere smiled, but not with scorn. 


MOTIIS. 


m 

'* I should be sorry to think I made any one unhappy. As for 
any success, as you call it, they t stare at the diamonds, I think. 
There are too many, perhaps.” 

“ Madame, no one looks at your diamonds,” said the old beau. 
“ There are diamonds enough elsewhere in the room to cover an 
Indian temple. You are willfully cruel. But ice never moved 
yet for mortals.” 

“ Am I really ice?” thought Vere, as she sat amidst the chang- 
ing groups that bent before her and hung on her words. She 
did not care for any of them. 

They found her unusually beautiful, and thronged about her. 
Another year it would be some one else — some one, probably, 
utterly unlike her. What was the worth of that? 

There are tempers which turn restive before admiration, to 
which flattery is tiresome, and to which a stare seems imperti- 
nence. This was her temper, and the great world did not 
change it. 

She moved slowly through the rooms, with the Eoc’s egg 
gleaming above her breast, and all the lesser stones seeming to 
flash sun-rays from snow as she moved, while she held a fan of 
white ostrich-feathers between her and her worshipers, and her 
train was upheld by two little De Sonnaz boys dressed as the 
Pole-star and the Frost. 

Her very silence, her defect usually to society, suited her beauty 
and her name that night: she seemed to have the stillness, the 
mystery, the ethereality, of the Arctic night. 

“ One grows cold as you pass, madame,” whispered the great 
prince whom she had not answered that day; “ cold with despair.” 

She made him a deep courtesy. She scarcely heard, tier eyes 
had a misty brilliance in them, she had forgotten his letter. She 
was wondering if her life would be always like this ball, a costly 
and empty pageant, and nothing more. 

Into the crowd there came at that moment a Venetian figure 
with a lute. His clothes were copied from those of the famous 
fresco of Battista Zelotti; he looked like Giorgione living once 
more. Some great ladies, safe in the defense of their masks, 
were pelting him with blossoms and bon-bons. He was laughing 
and defending himself with a gold caducous that he had stolen 
from a friend who was a Mercury. He was surrounded by a maze 
of colors and flowers and white arms. ” Fie was hurrying onward, 
but a personage too great to be gainsaid or avoided called out to 
him as he passed, “My friend, what use is your lute, since its 
chords are silent?” 

“Monseigneur,” answered the Jouer-du-luth, “like the singer 
who bears it, it has a voice never dumb for you.” 

They were in a long gallery away from the ball-room; the 
windows opened on the lamp-lit garden; the walls were tapestried 
figures of archers and pages and ladies worked in all the bright 
fair colors of the Gobelin looms; there was a gilded estrade that 
opened on to a marble terrace, that in its turn led to lawns, 
cedar-circled, and with little fountains springing up in the light 
and shadow. 

The Venetian lute-player moved a little backward, and leaned 
against the gilt railing. with his back to the garden and the ekv* 


m 


MOTHS . 


He touched a chord or two, sweet and far-reaching, seeming to 
bring on their sigh all the sweet, dead loves of the old dead 
ages. Then he sang to a wild melody that came from the 
Tchiganes, and that he had learned round their camp-fires on 
Hungarian plains at night, while the troops of young horses had 
scoured by through the gloom, affrighted by the flame and song. 
He sang the short verse of Heine, that has all the woe of two 
fives in eight lines: 

“ Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam 
Im Norden auf kahler Hoh’; 

Ihn schlafert; mit weisser Decke 
Umhullen ihn Eis und Schnee. 


Er traumt von einer Palme, 

Die fern im Morgenland 
Einsam und schweigend trauert 
Auf brennender Felsenwand.” 

As the first notes touched the air, Yere looked for the first 
time at the lute-player; she saw in him Correze. As for him- 
self, he had seen her all night — had seen nothing else even while 
he had laughed and jested and paid his court to others. 

He too had felt chill as she passed. 

And he sang the song of Heine — of the love of the palm and 
the pine. The royal prince had, with his own hands, silently 
pushed a low chair toward Vere. She sat there and listened, 
with her face to the singer and the illumined night. 

It was a picture of Venice. 

The lute-player leaned against the golden balustrade; the silver 
of falling water and shining clouds was behind him; around 
against the hues of the Gobelins stood the groups of maskers, gor- 
geous and somber as figures of the Renaissance. The distant music 
of the ball-room sounded like the echoes of a far-off chorus, and 
did not disturb the melody of the song, that hushed all laughter 
and all whispers and held the idlest and noisiest in its charm. 

“Give us more, oh, nightingale!” said the great prince. “Son 
of Procris! I wish we were in the old times of tyranny, that I 
could imprison you close to me all your life in a golden cage.” 

“ In a cage I should sing not a note, monseigneur. They are 
but bastard nightingales that sing imprisoned,” said Correze. 

All the while he did not look at Vere directly once, yet he saw 
nothing except that fair, cold, grave face, and the cold luster of 
the diamonds that were like light all over her. 

“ Sing once more, or recite,” said the prince, caressingly. 
“ Sing once more, and I will reward you; I will bring you into 
the light of the midnight sun, and after that you will never bear 
the glare of the common day.” 

“Is that reward, monseigneur ? To be made to regret all one’s 
life?” said Correze. 

And where he still leaned against the rail, with the moonlit 
and lamp -lit gardens behind him, he struck a chord or two lin- 
geringly on his lute, as Stradella might have struck them under 


/ 


MOTHS. m 

the shadow of St. Mark, and recited the “ Nuit de Mai ” of Alfred 
de Musset: 

M Poete, prends ton luth . . , . 

Le printemps nait ce suir . . . .” 

The “ Nuit d’Octobre ” is more famous, because it has been more 
often recited by great actors; but the “Nuit de Mai ” is perhaps 
still finer, and is more true to the temper and the destiny of 
poets. 

All the sweet intoxication of the spring-tide at evening, when 

le vin de la jeunesse fermente cette nuit dans les veines de Dieu” 
is but the prelude to the terrible struggle that has its symbol in 
the bleeding bird dying before the empty ocean and the desert 
shore, having rent its breast and spent its blood in vain. 

The superb peroration which closes one of the noblest and 
most sustained flights of imagery which any poet of any 
nation has ever produced, rolled through the silence of the room 
in the magnificent melody of a voice tuned alike by nature and 
by art to the highest expression of human feeling and of human 
eloquence. 

Then his voice dropped low, and stole, like a sigh of exhaustion, 
through the hush around him in the answer of the poet — the 
answer that the heart of every artist gives, soon or late, to 
Fate: 

“Oh, muse, spectre insatiable, 

Ne m’en demande pas si long. 

L’homme n’ecrit rien sur le sable 
A l’heure ou passe l’aquilon. 

J’ai vu la temps ou ma jeunesse 
Sur vos levres etait sans cesse, 

Prete a chanter comme un oiseau; 

Mais j’ai souffert un dur martyre, 

Et le moins que j’en pourrais dire. 

Si je l’essayais sur ma lyre, 

Le briserait sur un roseau.” 

When the words sank into silence, the silence remained unbrok- 
en. The careless, the frivolous, the happy, the cynical, were all 
Alike smitten into a sudden pain, a vague regret, and, for that 
passing moment, felt the pang the poet feels, always till death 
comes to him. 

Two great tears rolled down the cheeks of the loveliest woman 
there, and fell on the great diamonds. When the prince, who 
had shaded his eyes with his hand, looked up, the lute-player 
bowed low to him and glided through the crowd. 

“ And I was just about to present him to the Princess Zouroff,” 
said the royal personage, slightly annoyed and astonished. 
“Well, one must pardon his caprices, for we have no other like 
him; and Sperhaps ghis judgment is true. One who can imove us 
like that should not, immediately on our emotion, speak to us 
like a mere mortal in compliment or commonplace. The artist, 
like the god, should dwell unseen sometimes. But I envy him, 
if I forgive him.” 

For he looked at the dimmed eyes of Vere. 


m 


MOTHS. 


CHAPTER XVTL 

On the day following, Correze left Paris to fulfill his London* 
engagements: it was the beginning of May. 

When his name disappeared from the announcements, and his 
person fromthe scenes of the Grand Opera, then, and then alone, 
vere begauto realize all that those nights at the lyric theater had 
been in her life. 

When she ceased to hear that one perfect voice, the whole 
world seemed mute. Those few hours in each week had gone so 
far to solace her for the weariness, the haste, the barren magnifi- 
cence, and the tiresome adulation of her world — had done so 
much to give her some glimpse of the ideal life, some echo of 
lost dreams, some strength to bear disillusion and disgust. 

The utter absence of vanity in her made her incapable of 
dreaming that Correze avoided hei because he remembered only 
too well. She fully thought he had forgotten her. What was a 
morning by the sea, with a child, in the overfull life of a man 
foremost in art and in pleasure, consecrated at once to the Muses 
and the world? She was quite sure he had forgotten her. Even 
as he had recited the “ Nuit de Mai ” his eyes had had no recog- 
nition in them. So she thought. 

This error made her memory of him tender, innocent, and wist- 
ful as a memory of the dead, and softened away all alarm for her 
from the emotion that possessed her. 

He was nothing to her — nothing — except a memory; and she 
was not even that to him. 

Paris became very oppressive to her. 

That summer Prince Zouroff, by Imperial command, returned 
to his estate in Russia, to complete the twelve months’ residence 
which had been commanded him. 

They were surrounded by a large house-party, wherever they 
resided, and were never alone. Yere fulfilled the social duties of 
her high station with grace, and courtesy, but he found her too 
cold, too negligent in society, and reproached her continually 
for some indifference to punctilio, some oblivion of precedence. 

Neither her mind nor her heart was with these things. All of 
them seemed to her so trivial and so useless; she had been bom 
with her mind and her heart both framed for greater force and 
richer interest than the pomp of etiquette and ceremonial, the 
victories of precedence and prestige. 

They had made her a great lady, a woman of the world, a court 
beauty, but they could not destroy in her the temper of the stu- 
dious and tender-hearted child who had read Greek with her dogs 
about her under the old trees of Bulmer Chase. She had ceased 
to study because she was too weary, and she strove to steel and 
chill her heart because its tenderness could bring her no good*, 
yet she could not change her nature. The world was always so 
little to her; her God and the truth were so much. She had been 
feared in the old fashion, and she remained of it. 

In the gorgeous routine of her life in Russia she always heard 
ili memory the echo of the Nuit de Mah 


MOTHS. 


175 


A great lassitude and hopelessness came over her, which there 
vms no one to rouse and no one to dispel. Marriage could never 
bring her aught better than it brought her already — a luxurious 
and ornamented slavery; and maternity could bring her no con- 
solation, for she knew very well that her children would be dealt 
with as tyrannically as was her life. 

They remained that winter in Russia. The Duke andDuchesse 
de Sonnaz came there for a little time, and the Duchesse Jeanne 
wore out her silver skates at the midnight fetes upon the ice, a 
miracle of daring and agility, in her favorite crimson colors, 
with her sparkling and ugly face beaming under a hood of fur. 

“ Why does one never tire of you?' Zouroff muttered, as he 
waltzed with her over the Neva in o*e of the most gorgeous 
fetes of the winter season. 

Madame J eanne laughed. 

“ Because I am ugly, perhaps, or because as you said once, fat 
le talent de m’encanailler. But then so many have that.” 

He said nothing, but as he felt her wheel and dart with the 
swiftness of a swallow, elastic and untiring as though her hips 
were swung on springs of steel, he thought to himself that it 
was because she never tired herself. “ Elle se grise si t>ien ,” he 
said of her when he had resigned her to an officer of the guard 
that night. To se griser with drink, or with play, or with folly, 
or with politics, is the talent of the moment that is most popular. 
To be temperate is to be stupid. 

His wife, in her ermine folds, which clothed her as in snow 
from head to foot, and without any point of color on her any- 
where, with her grave proud eyes that looked like arctic stars, 
and her slow, silent, undulating movement, might have the ad- 
miration of the court and city, but had no charm for him. She 
was his own; he had paid a price for her that he at times be- 
grudged, and she had humiliated him. In a sense she was a per- 
petual humiliation to him, for he was a man of intellect enough 
to know her moral worth, and to know that he had never been 
worthy to pass the threshold of her chamber, to touch the hem 
of her garment. At the bottom of his heart there was always a 
sullen reverence for her, an unwilling veneration for her sinless- 
ness and her honor, which only alienated him farther from her 
with each day. 

“ Why would you marry a young saint?” said his friend, the 
Duchesse Jeanne, always to him in derisive condolence. 

Did he wish her a sinner instead? There were times when he 
almost felt that he did; when he almost felt that even at the 
price of his own loss he would like to see her head drop and her 
eyes droop under some consciousness of evil — would like to be 
able to cast at her some bitter name of shame. 

There were times when he almost hated her, hated her for the 
transparent purity of her regard, for the noble scorn of her nat- 
ure, for the silence and the patience with which she endured 
his many outrages. “ After all,” he thought to himself, “ what 
right has she to be so far above us all? She gave herself to me 
for my rank, as the others gave themselves for my gold.” 

That cold, glittering winter passed like a pageant, and in 


MOTHS , . 


midst of it there came a sorrow to her that had in it something 
of remorse. The old Dowager Duchess at Bulmer died after a 
day’s illness — died in solitude, except for the faithful servants 
about her — and was buried under the weird bent oaks by th*i 
moor, by the northern sea. Vere lamented bitterly. 

“ And she died without knowing the truth of me!” she thought, 
with bitter pain; and there was no message of pardon, no sign of 
remembrance from the dead to console her. “We are an unfor- 
giving race,” thought Vere, wearily. “I, too, cannot forgive. 
I can endure, but I cannot pardon.” 

This loss, and the state of her own health, gave her reason and 
cause for leaving the world a little while. She remained absent 
while her husband waltzed with the Duchesse Jeanne at Imperial 
balls and winter fetes, and gave suppers in the cafes of which the 
rooms were bowers of palms and roses, and the drinkers drank 
deep till the red sunrise. 

She remained in solitude in the vast, luxurious, carefully heated 
palace of the Zouroff princes, where never a breath of cold . air 
penetrated. Her health suffered from that imprisonment in a 
hothouse, which was as unnatural to her as it would have been 
to one of the young oak trees of Bulmer Chase or to one of its 
moor-born forest does. 

Another child was born to her, and born dead — a frail, pale 
little corpse, that never saw the light of the world. She was 
long ill, and even the tediousness and exhaustion of lengthened 
weakness were welcome to her, since they released her from the 
court, from society, and from her husband. 

When she was at length strong enough to breathe the outer 
air, the ice was broken up on the Neva, and even in Russia trees 
were budding, and grass pushing up its slender spears through 
the earth. 

The Duchesse de Sonnazhad long before returned to Paris, and 
Prince Zouroff had gone there for business. By telegram he 
ordered his wife to join him as soon as she was able, and she also 
traveled there with Madame Nelaguine when all the lilac was 
coming into blossom in the Tuileries and the Luxembourg gar- 
dens and behind the Hotel Zouroff in the Avenue de lTmpera- 
trice. 

A year had gone by; she had never seen the face of Correze. 

She had learned in mid-winter by the public voice that he had 
refused all engagements in Russia, giving as the plea the injury 
to his throat from the'climate in past seasons. She had seen by 
the public press that he had been singing in Madrid and Vienna, 
had been to Rome for his pleasure, and for months had been, as 
of old, the idol of Paris. 

As she entered the city it was of him once more that she 
thought. 

A flush of reviving life came into the paleness of her cheek, 
and a throb ©f eager expectation to her pulses, as she thought that 
once more in the opera-house she would hear that perfect melody 
of the tones which had chanted the Nuit de Mai. It was May now, 
she remembered, and it was also night with her, one long, darky 
hopeless night. 


MOTHS , 


m 

u Viola la [belle Princesse!” said a work-girl, with a sigh of 
envy, as she chanced to stand by the great gilded gates of the 
Hotel Zouroff as Yere went through them in her carriage, lying 
back on the cushions of it with what was the lassitude of phys- 
ical and mental fatigue, but to the work- girl looked like the 
haughty indolence and languor of a great lady. She was more 
beautiful than she had ever been, but she looked much older than 
she was; her youth was frozen in her* the ice seemed in her 
Veins, in her brain, in her heart. 

Prince Zouroff met her at the foot of the staircase. He had 
been in Paris two months. 

“ I hope you are not too tired?” he said, politely, and gave her 
his arm to ascend the stairs. “ You look terribly white,” he 
added, when they were alone, and had reached the drawing- 
room. “ You will really have to rouge, believe me.” 

Then, as if remembering a duty, he kissed her carelessly. 

“ I hope you will feel w r ell enough to go to Orloff’s to-night,’* 
he added; “ I have promised that you will, and Worth tells me 
that he has sent you some new miracle expressly for it. The 
party is made for the grand-duke, you know.” 

“I dare say I shall be well enough,” Yere answered him sim- 
ply. “ If you will excuse me, I will go to my room and lie down 
a little while.” 

She went to her bedchamber where the “Slave” of Gerome 
hung on the wall. 

“All these came this morning and yesterday for madame,” said 
her maid, showing her a table full of letters, and notes, and invi- 
tation-cards, and one large bouquet of roses amidst them. 

Roses had been around her all winter in St. Petersburg, but 
these were very lovely, unforced flowers — all the varieties of the 
tea-rose in their shades and sizes, with their delicate, faint smell, 
that is like the scent of old perfumed laces; but in the center of 
all these roses of fashion and culture there was a ring of the 
fragrant, homely, dewy cabbage rose, and in the very center of 
these, again, a little spray of sweet-brier. 

Yere bent her face over their sweetness 

“Who sent these?” she asked; and before she asked she 
knew. 

No one in the house did know. The bouquet had been left 
that morning for her. There was no name with it except her own 
name. 

But the little branch of Sweet-brier said to her that it was th© 
welcome of Correze, who had not forgotten. 

It touched and soothed her. It seemed very sweet and 
thoughtful beside the welcome of her husband, who bade her 
rouge and go to an embassy ball. 

“I always thought he had forgotten!” she mused, and, tired 
though she was, with her own hands she set the roses in a great 
cream-colored bowl of Pesaro pottery of Casali di Lodi’s and had 
them close beside her couch as she fell asleep. 

She, who had so much pride, had no vanity. It seemed strange 
to her that in his brilliant and busy life full of its triumphs and 


378 MOTHS. 

its changes, he should remember one summer morning by the 
sea with a child. 

That night she went to the splendor of Prince OrlofFsfete; she 
did not rouge, but Paris found her lovelier than she had ever 
been; beneath the diamonds on her breast flihe had put a little bit 
of sweet-brier that no one saw. It seemed to her like a little tal- 
isman come out to her from her old, lost life, when she and the 
world had been strangers. 

It was a great party in the Rue de Grenelle. Correze was 
there as a guest; he did not approach her. 

I The next night she was in her box in the opera-house. Correze 
sang in the Prophete. She met the gaze of his eyes across the 
house, and something in their regard throbbed through her with 
a thrill like pain, and haunted her. He had never been in grand- 
er force or more wondrous melody than he was that night. The 
Duchessede Sonnaz, who accompanied Yere, broke her fan in 
the vehemence and enthusiasm of her applause. 

“ They say that there are two tenor voices, la voix de clair on 
et la voix de clarinette ,” she said. “ The voice of Correze is the 
voixde clair on of an archangel.” 

Yere sighed, quickly and wearily. 

Jeanne de Sonnaz looked at her with a sudden and close 
scrutiny. 

“Was there not some story of her and Correze?” she thought. 

The next evening Correze was free. 

He dined at Bignon’s with some friends before going to the re- 
ception-fete of the great world. As they left the cafe about ten 
o’clock they saw Prince Zouroff enter with a companion and 
pass on to one of the private rooms: he was laughing loudly. 

“Who is with him to-night?” said one of the men who had 
dined with Correze. Another of them answered: 

“ Did you not see her black eyes and her mouth like a poppy? 
It is Oasse-une-Croute.” 

Correze said nothing; he bade his friends good-night and 
walked down the Avenue de l’Opera by himself, though rain was 
falling and strong winds blew. 

If he had followed his impulse he would have gone back into 
Bignon’s, forced open the door of the cabinet particulier, and 
struck Sergius Zouroff. But he had no right I 

He returned to his own rooms, dressed, and went to two or 
three great parties. The last house he went to was the hotel in 
the Faubourg St. Germain of the Due and Duchesse de Sonnaz. 

It was a great soiree for foreign royalties; Yere was present; 
the last injunction of her husband had been, as she had risen 
from the table, “ Go to Jeanne’s by one o’clock to-night, or she 
will be annoyed; you will say I am engaged: there is a club- 
meeting at the Ganaches.” 

Vere never disobeyed his commands. 

“ I cannot love or honor you,” she had said to him once, “ but 
I can obey you;” and she did so at all times. 

The night was brilliant. 

It recalled the best days of the perished empire. 

The Princess Zouroff came late; Correze saw her arrive, and 


MOTHS. 


179 


the crowds part to let her pass as they part for sovereigns; she 
wore black velvet only; she was still in mourning; her white 
beauty looked as though it were made of snow. 

“ And he goes to a mulattress!” thought Correze. 

Later in the evening she chanced to be seated where there 
stood a grand piano in one of the drawing-rooms. He saw her 
from afar off; the Duchesse Jeanne- passing him hurriedly was 
saying to him at the time, “If only you had not that cruel, selfish 
rule never to sing a note for your friends, what a charm of the 
bel imprevu you might give to my poor little ball!” 

Correze bowed before her. “ Madame, my rules, like all laws 
of the universe, must yield to you!” 

He crossed the drawing-room to the piano. 

Correze had never before consented to sing professionally in 
private houses. 

“The theater is a different affair, but I do not choose my 
friends to pay me money,” he universally answered, and out of 
the theater he was never heard, unless he sang for charity or as 
an act of mere friendship. Even as a social kindness it was so 
rarely that any one could induce him to be heard at all, that 
when this night he approached the piano and struck a minor 
chord or two, the princely crowds hurried together to be near 
like the commonest mob in the world. Vere only did not move 
from where she sat on a low chair beneath some palms, and the 
four or five gentlemen about her remained still because she did so. 

She was some little distance from the instrument, but she saw 
him as he moved toward it more nearly than she had done since 
the recital of the Nuit de Mai. 

She saw the beautiful and animated face that had fascinated 
her young eyes in the early morning light on the rocks of the 
Calvados shore. He had not changed in any way; something of 
the radiance and gayety of its expression was gone — that was all. 

He sat down and ran his hands softly over the keys in Schu- 
mann’s “Adieu.” She could no longer see him for the plumes of 
the palms and blossoms of the azaleas, that made a grove of 
foliage and flowers which concealed the piano, and there was a 
courtly crowd of gay people apd grand people gathered around him 
in silence, waiting for the first sound of that voice which, because 
it was so rarely heard, was so eagerly desired. Hour after hour 
in his own rooms he would sing to the old man Auber, whom he 
loved, or in the rough studios in the village of Barbizan he would 

g ive his music all night long to artists whose art he cared for, 
ut by the world of fashion he was never heard out of the opera- 
house. 

He struck a few pathetic chords in B minor, and sang to a mel- 
ody of his own a song of Heine — 

“ In mein gar zu dunkles Leben,” — 

the song of the singer who is “ like a child lost in the dark.** 

Had she understood that he had no tale to tell? Had the song 
of Heine, that bewailed a vanished vision, carried his secret to 
her? He could not tell. 


MQTH8. 


m 

She sat quite still and did not lift her eyes. The crowd moved 
and screened her from his view. 

“Will she understand?” he thought, as the applause of the 
polite crowd around him followed on the breathless stillness of 
delight with which they had listened. He heard nothing that 
they said to him. He was looking at her in the distance, where 
she sat with the great white fan dropped upon her knee and her 
eyelids drooped over her eyes. He was thinking as he looked— 

“ And that brute goes with a quadroon to a restaurant! And 
when she had a dead child born to her, he went all the while 
with Jeanne de Sonnaz to masked balls and court fetes on the 
ice!” 

Over his mobile face as he mused a dark shadow went — the 
shadow of passionate disgust and of futile wrath. 

His hands strayed a little over the keys, toying with memories 
of Chopin, and Beethoven, and Palestrina. Then, to the air of 
a Salutaris Hostia that he had composed and sung for a great 
mass in . Notre Dame years before, he sang, clear and low as a 
mavis’ call at daybreak to its love, the Priere of a French poet. 

She could not see him for the throngs of grand people and 
giddy people who surged about him in their decorations and 
their jewels, but the first notes of his voice came to her clear as a 
bird’s call at daybreak to its love. 

He sang to a melody in the minor of his own the simple 
pathetic verses of a young poet: 

“ Pkiere. 

44 Ah! si vous saviez comme on pleure 
De vivre seul et sans foyers, 

Quelquefois devant ma demeure 
Vous passeriez. 

44 Si vous saviez ce que fait naitre 
Dans l’ame triste un pur regard, 

Yous regarderiez ma fenetre, 

Comme au liasard. 

44 Si vous saviez quel baume apporte 
Au coeur la presence d’un cceur, 

Yous vous assoiriez sous ma porte, 

Comme une sceur. 

44 Si vous saviez que je vous aime, 

Surtout si vous saviez comment, 

Vous entreriez peut-etre meme 
Tout simplement.” 

His voice sank to silence as softly as a rose-leaf falls to earth, 

Then there arose, like the buzz of a thousand insects, the ados 
jug applause of a polished society. 

44 Si vous saviez que je vous aime, 

Surtout si vous saviez comment, 

Yous entreriez peut-etre meme 
Tout simplementl” 


MOTHS 


The words had filled the room with their sweet ineffable 
raelody, and had reached Yere and brought their confession to 
her. 

Her heart leaped like a bound thing set free; then a burning 
warmth that seemed to her like fire itself seemed to flood her 
veins. For some way the great crowd parted, and she saw the 
face of Correze for a moment, and his eyes met hers. 

He had told his tale in the language he knew best and loved 
the most. 

The next'he was lost in the midst of his worshipers, who vain- 
ly implored him to return and sing again. 

Vere, tutored by the world she lived in, sat quite still, and let 
her broad fan of white feathers lie motionless in her hands. 

“ Am I vile to have told her? Surely she must know it so 
well!” said Correze to himself, as he sent his horses away and 
walked through the streets of Paris in the chill mists that herald- 
ed daylight. “Am I vile to have told her? Will she ever look 
at me again? Will she hate me forever? Will she understand? 
Perhaps not. I sing a thousand songs; why should one have 
more meaning than another? She sees me play a hundred pas- 
sions on the stage: why should she believe I can feel one? And 
yet — and yet I think she will know, and perhaps she will not for- 
give; I fear she will never forgive.” 

He reproached himself bitterly as he walked home after mid- 
night through the throngs of the Boulevards. He said to himself 
that if he had not seen Sergius Zouroff entering Bignon’s he 
would never so far have broken his resolution and failed in his 
honor. He reached his home disturbed by apprehension and 
haunted with remorse. For an empire he would not have 
breathed a profane word in the ear of the woman who fulfilled 
his ideal of women, and he was afraid that he had insulted her. 

He did not go to his bed at all; he walked up and down his 
®ong suite of rooms in the intense scent of the hot-house bouquets 
which as usual covered every table and console in the chambers. 

For a less declaration than that, he had seen great ladies glide 
veiled through his doors; nay, they had come unasked. 

But he knew very well that she would never come one step on 
the way to meet him, even if she understood. 

And that she would even understand he doubted. 

The morning rose, and the sun broke the mists, but its rays 
could not pierce through the olive velvet of his closed curtains 
He walked to and fro restlessly through the artificial light and 
fragrance of his rooms. If she had been like the others, if he 
had heard her step on the stair, if he had seen that proud head 
veiled in the mask of a shameful secrecy, what would he have 
f e lt?_he thought he would have felt the instant rapture, the 
endless despair, that men felt in the old days who sold their 
souls to hell; the rapture that lived an hour, the despair that en- 
dured an eternity. 

When he threw back his shutters and saw the brightness of 
jnoming, he rang and ordered his horse and rode out into the 
Bois without breaking his fast. The rides were all moist with 
the night’s rain; the boughs were all green with young leaf 


m 


MOTHS. 


birds were singing as though it were the heart of the provinces. 
He rode fast and recklessly; the air was clear and fresh with a 
west wind stirring in it; it refreshed him more than sleep. 

As he returned, two hours later, he saw her walking in one of 
the allees despietons; she was in black, with some old white laces 
about her throat; before her were her dogs, and behind her was 
a Russian servant. He checked his horse in the ride adjacent, 
and waited for her to pass by him. 

She did pass, bowed without looking at him, and went onward 
between the stems of the leafless trees. 

Then he thought to himself that she had understood, but he 
doubted that she ever would forgive. 

When she was quite out of sight, he dismounted, gathered a 
late violet in the grass where she had passed ,him, and rode 
home. 

“ She understood a little,” he thought, “ enough to alarm, 
enough to offend her. She is too far above us all to understand 
more. Even life spent by the side of that brute has not tainted 
her. They are right to call her the ice-flower. She dwells apart 
in higher air than we ever breathe.” 

And his heart sank, and his life seemed very empty. He loved 
a woman who was nothing to him, who could be nothing to him, 
and who, even if ever she loved him, he would no more drag 
down to the low level of base frailties than he would spit upon 
the cross his fathers worshiped. 

The next night was the last of his engagement at the Grand 
Opera. It was a night of such homage and triumph as even he 
had hardly ever known. But to him it was blank; the box that 
was Prince Zouroff’s w r as empty. 

He left Paris at daybreak. 

Yere did indeed, but imperfectly, understand. As the song 
had reached her ear a sudden flood of joy came to her with it; it 
had been to her as if the heavens had opened; she had for one 
moment realized all that her life might have been, and she saw 
that he would have loved her. 

When she reached the solitude of her chamber at home, she 
reproached herself; she seemed to herself to have sinned, and 
it seemed to her a supreme vanity to have dreamed of a personal 
message in the evening song of an eloquent singer. Did be not 
sing every night of love — every night that the public applauded 
the sorcery of his matchless music? 

That he might have loved her she did believe. There was a 
look in his regard that told her so whenever his eyes met hers 
across the opera-house, or in the crowds of the streets or of 
society. But of more she did not, would not, think. 

Perhaps some memory of that one summer morning haunted 
him, as it haunted her, with the sad vision of a sweetness that 
might have been in life and never would be now; perhaps a 
vague regret was really with him. So much she thought, but 
nothing more. 

The world she lived in had taught her nothing of its vanities, 
of its laxities, of its intrigues. She kept the heart of her girl- 
hood, She was still of the old fashion, and a faithless wife was 


MOTHS. 383 

to her a wanton. Marriage might be loveless, and joyless, and 
soulless, and outrage all that it brought; but its bond had been 
taken, and its obligations accepted ; no sin of others could set her 
free. 

Her husband could not have understood that, nor could her 
mother, nor could her world; but to Yere it was clear as the day, 
that, not to be utterly worthless in her own sight, not to be base 
as the sold creatures of the streets, she must give fidelity to 
the faithless, cleanliness to the unclean. 

Even that caress !*he had given to the roses seemed to her 
treacherous and wrong. 


CHAPTER XVIIl. 

Prince Zouroff stayed in Paris until the end of June. There 
was no place that he liked so well. Lady Dolly passed a few 
weeks at Meurice’s, and told her daughter, with a little malice 
and a little pleasure, that the son to whom the Duchess of Mull 
had recently given birth, to the joy of all the Northumbrian bor- 
der, had been baptized with the name of Yere, with much pomp, 
at Castle Herbert. 

# “My name and my father’s!” said Yere, with coldest indigna- 
tion. “And her father sold drink and opium to miners!” 

“ And the brothers kill pigs — by machinery,” said her mother, 
“ Certainly it is very funny. If Columbus had never discovered 
America, would all these queer things have happened to us? 
There is no doubt we do get ‘mixed,’ as the lovely Fuschia 
would say.” 

Pick-me-up, as Duchess of Mull, had become even a greater 
success, were that possible, than Fuschia Leach had been. No 
fancy frisk, no little dinner, no big ball, was anything without that 
brilliantly tinted face of hers, with the little impertinent nose, 
and the big, radiant, audacious eyes that had the glance of the street- 
Arab and the surprise of the fawn. Francis of Mull, tender, 
stupid, and shy, lived in a perpetual intoxication at the wonder 
of his own possession of so much beauty, so much mirth, and 
so much audacity, and no more dreamed of opposing her wishes 
than, excellent young man that he was, he had ever dreamed of 
opposing his tutors and guardians. He was under her charm in 
a blind, dazed, benighted way that diverted her and yet made 
her heartily sick of him; and she took the reins of government 
into her own hands and kept them. Not a tree was felled, not a 
horse was bought, not a farm-lease was signed, but what the 
young duchess knew the reason why. 

“ I’ll stop all this beastly waste, and yet I’ll do it much finer, 
and get a lot more for my money,” she said to herself when she 
first went to the biggest house of all their houses, and she did so 
with that admirable combination of thrift and display of which 
the American mind alor.c has the secret. 

The expenses of his household in six months had been dimin- 
ished by seven thousand pounds, yet the Duke of Mull had en- 
tertained royalty for three days at Castle Herbert with a splendor 


IG4 


MOTHS . 


that his county had never seen. She was not at all mean, ex* 
cept in charities, but she got her money’s worth. 

44 My dear old donkey, your wife didn’t go pricing sprats all 
down Broadway without knowing what to give for a red her- 
ring,” said Her Grace, in the familiar yet figurative language in 
which the great nation she had belonged to delights. 

“ Cooking accounts won’t go down with her,” said the bailiffs, 
and the butlers, and the housekeepers, and the stud-grooms, and 
the head-gardeners, to one another with a melancholy unanimity 
at all her houses. 

44 Do you know, Vere, she is a great success,” said Lady Dolly 
one day. “Very, very great. There is nobody in all England 
one-quarter so popular.” 

44 1 quite believe it,” said Vere. 

44 Then why won’t you be friends with her?” 

44 Why should I be?” 

44 Well, she is your cousin.” 

44 She is a woman my cousin has married. There is no possible 
relation between her and me.” 

44 But do you not think it is always as well to — to — be pleas- 
ant?” 

“No, I do not. If no one else remember the oaks of the 
forests, I do not forget them.” 

“Oh, the oaks,” said Lady Dolly. “Yes, they are mining 
there; but they are nasty, damp, windy places; I don’t see that 
it matters.” 

44 What a terrible proud woman you are, Vere!” added the 
Princess Nadine, who was every whit as proud as herself, “ and 
yet you think so little of rank.” 

“I think nothing of rank,” said Vere, “but I do think very 
much of race; and I cannot understand how men who are so 
careful of the descent of their horses and hounds, are so indiffer- 
ent to the contamination of their own blood.” 

44 If you had lived before ’90 you would have gone very grandly 
to the guillotine,” said her sister-in-law. 

“ I should have gone in good company,” said Vere, 44 it is diffi- 
cult to live in it nowadays.” 

“With what an air you say that,” said Madame Nelaguine; 
“ really one would think you were a marquise of a hundred 
years old, and in your childhood had seen your chateau burnt by 
the mob.” 

“All my chateaux were burnt long ago,” said Vere, with a sigh 
that she stifled. 

Madame Nelaguine understood. 

She was glad when the warmth grew greater with the days of 
early summer, and her husband, entering her morning-room, 
said, abruptly — 

44 The Grand Prix is run to-morrow. You seem to have for- 
gotten it. On Saturday we will go down to Felicite. You will 
invite Madame de Sonnaz and Madame de Mirilhac, and any one 
else that you please. Nadine will come, no doubt.” 

A Zouroff horse won the Grand Prix, and Prince Zouroff was 
for once in a contented mood, which lasted all the next day. As 


MOTHS. \185 

&e train ran through the level green country towards Calvados, 
he said with good-humored gallantry to his wife — 

“ You have not invited me, Vera. The place is yours, I have 
no business in it unless you wish for me.” 

. “ The place is always yours, and I am yours,” she answered 
in a low tone. 

From a woman who had loved him the words would have been 
tender; from her, they were but an acknowledgment of being 
purchased. His humor changed as he heard them; his face grew 
dark; he devoted himself to Madame Jeanne, who was traveling 
with them; she had refused to stay at Felicite, however, and had 
taken for herself the little Chalet Ludoff at Trouville. 

“ You are a bear; but she makes you dance, Sergius,” whis- 
pered the duchess, with malice. 

Zouroff frowned. 

“ Bears do something besides dancing,” he muttered. 

“ Yes; they eat honey,” replied Madame de Sonnaz. “You 
have had more honey than was good for you all your days. Now 
you have got something that is not honey.” 

Vere, with her delicate straight profile against the light, sat 
looking at the green fields and the blue sky, and did not hear 
what was said. 

“ If she cared, or rather if she understood,” thought the Duch- 
esse Jeanne, as she glanced at her, “ she would rule him instead 
of being ruled; she could do it; but she would have to keep the 
bear on hot plates — as I did.” 

Zouroff, screened behind “Figaro,” looked from one woman 
to the other. 

“ How grand dame she is!” he thought. “Beside her Jeanne 
looks bizarre , ugly, almost vulgar. And yet Vera bores me 
when she does not enrage me, and enrages me when she does not 
bore me; while with the other, one is always on good terms with 
one’s self.” 

“ I know what you were thinking, my friend,” whispered the 
duchess under cover of the noise and twilight of the Martainville 
tunnel. “ But all the difference, I assure you, is that she is your 
wife and I am Paul’s. If she were not your wife you would be 
furiously in love with her, and were I your wife you would find 
me a cliatte enragee with frightful green eyes.” 

Zouroff laughed grimly. He did not tell her that his thoughts 
had been less complimentary than those she had attributed to 
him. 

“ I could find it in me to tell you your eyes were green when 
you spite me by not coming to Felicite,” he murmured instead. 

Madame Jeanne twisted the “ Figaro ” about, and said, “ Chut! 
We shall meet more freely at the little Ludoff house.” 

Vere only heard the rustling of the “ Figaro ” sheet. She was 
looking at the clock-tower of St. Tcurin and the summer glory 
of the forest of Evreux. 

Madame Jeanne stayed at Trouville. Vere, with her husband, 
drove in the panier, with four white ponies, that awaited them 
at the station, along the shady avenue that leads out of the val- 
ley of the Tourque toward Villers. The sunshine was brilliant, 


286 


MOTHS. 


the air sweet, the sea, when the rise of the road brought it into 
view, was blue as the sky, and the fishing-fleets were on it. Vera 
closed her eyes as the bright marine picture came in sight, and 
felt the tears rise into them. 

Only three years before, she had been Vere Herbert, coming on 
the dusty sands below, with no more knowledge or idea of the 
world’s pomps, and vanities, and sins, and vices, than any one 
of the bright-eyed deer that were now living out their happy 
lives under the oak shadows of Bulmer Chase. Only three years 
before! 

Zouroff, lying back in the little carriage, looked at her through 
his half -shut eyelids. 

“ Ma chere,” he said, with his little rough laugh, “we ought 
to feel very sweet emotions, you and I, "returning here. Tell me, 
are you a la hauteur de Voccasion? I fear I am not. Perhaps, 
after a glass of sherry, the proper emotion may visit me.” 

Vere made no reply. Her eyes, wide-opened now, were look- 
ing straight forward: she drove her ponies steadily. 

‘ * V/ hat do you feel?” he persisted. ‘ * It is an interesting return. 
Pray tell me.” 

“I have ceased to analyze what I feel,” she answered, in her 
clear cold voice. “ I prefer to stifle it.” 

“ You are very courteous!” 

“ I think you have very often said yourself that courtesy is 
not one of the obligations of marriage. You ask me for the 
truth, I tell you the truth.” 

‘ ‘ In two years of the world have you not learned a pretty lie 
yet?” 

“ No. I shall not learn it in twenty years.” 

“Do you know that there are times when you answer me so 
that I could beat you like a dog?” 

“ I dare say.” 

“Is that all you say?” 

“What should I say? If you beat me, it would not hurt me 
much more than other things.” 

Zouroff was silent. He saw that she drove her ponies on tran- 
quilly, and that her blush-rose cheek neither flushed nor paled. 
Master of her body and mind, present and future, though he was, 
he had a sullen sense of her escaping him always, and he had as 
sullen a respect for her courage and her calmness. 

“She would be a mother of young lions!” he thought, as Lam- 
artine thought of Delphine Gay, and he felt bitter against her 
that his sons had died. 

They reached Felicite as the sun set aver the sea, where the low 
shores by the Caen were hidden in a golden mist. The dressing- 
bell was ringing in the Gothic clock-tower; the tribe of canary- 
hued lackeys were bending to the ground in the beautiful cedar- 
wood hall, with its pointed arches, and its illuminated shields, 
which had captivated the young eyes of Vere Herbert. 

Madame Nelaguine had arrived before them, and her welcome, 
wit, and careful tact saved them from the terrors and the tedium 
of a tete-a-tete . 

“Are you glad to come here, Vera?” she asked. 


corns’. 


18 ? 


W I am glad to see the sea,” answered Vere. “ But I am tired 
of moving from house to house. We have no home. We have 
only a number of hotels.” 

“ I think you will be happier than in Paris,” said the Princess 
Nadine. “You will have the trouble of a house- party, it is true; 
but your mornings you can spend in your garden, your hot- 
houses, with your horses, or on the sea: you will be freer.” 

“Yes,” assented Yere. She did not hear; she was looking 
through the great telescope on the terrace down along the line 
of the shore: she was trying to discern among the broken con- 
fused indentations of the rocky beach the place where Correze 
had sung to her and to the lark. But the sea and land were 
blent in one golden glow as the sun went down behind the 
black cliffs of western Calvados, and she could discern nothing 
that she knew. 

The dressing-bell was ringing, and she hurried to her rooms. 
Her husband was intolerant of any excuses of fatigue or indispo- 
sition, and always expected to see her in full toilet whether 
there was no one, or whether there were fifty persons, at his ta- 
ble. Sometimes it seemed to her as if all her life were consumed 
in the mere acts of dressing and undressing; the paradise of other 
women was her purgatory. 

They dined alone, only enlivened by the ironies of the Princess 
Nadine, who when she chose could be exceedingly amusing, if 
very acid in her satires; when dinner was over they went out 
on to the terrace, where the moonlight was brilliant. Some gen- 
tlemen from the Chateau Villiers had ridden over to congratu- 
late Prince Zouroff on the achievement of his racer. They were 
old friends of his, heroes and disciples of “le sport.” After a 
while they talked only of that idol. Vere sat looking at the 
moonlit channel. Madame Nelaguine, within the room, was 
playing quaint mournful melodies of old German composers, 
and sad Russian folk-airs. Felicite was very peaceful, very lovely; 
on the morrow the glittering noisy feverish life of the great world 
would begin under its roof, with its house-party of Parisians and 
Russians. 

“ What a pity, wiiat a pity! One has not time 1 to breathe,” 
thought Yere, as she leaned her head against the marble balus- 
trade and rested her eyes on the sea. 

“ What a pity!” she thought, “ the loveliest things in all crea- 
tion are the sunrise and moonlight; and who has time in our 
stupid life, that is called pleasure, to see either of them?”. 

A full moon made the narrow sea a sheet of silver; a high tide 
had carried the beach up to the edge of the black rocks; in the 
white luminous space one little dark sail was slowly drifting be- 
fore the wind, the sail of a fishing or dredging-boat. The calm- 
ness, the silence, the luster, the sweet, fresh, strong, sea scent, 
so familiar to her in her childhood, filled her with an infinite 
melancholy. 

Only three years, and how changed she was! All her youth 
had been burnt up in her; all hope was as dead in her heart as if 
fche were already old. 

She sat and thought, as the dreamy musie from within united 


188 


MOTHS 


with the murmur of the sea; she had said truly that she now 
strove to stifle thought, but her nature was meditative, and she 
could never wholly succeed. 

“ Perhaps I am not right, perhaps I do not do all that I might, 51 
she mused; and her conscience reproached her with harshness 
and hatred against the man whom she had sworn to honor. 

“Honorl” she thought, bitterly; what a world of mockery lay 
in that one little word! 

Yet he was her husband; according to his light he had been 
generous to her; she would have to bear his children, and his 
name was her name forever. It would be better if they could 
live in peace. 

When his friends had ridden back to Yilliers, and his sister was 
still dreamily wandering through many musical memories, Ser- 
gius ZourofE was standing on the terrace, looking seaward, and 
calculating how quickly his yacht would be able tc come round 
on the morrow from Cherbourg. Midnight chimes were sounding 
softly in his Flemish carillon in the clock-tower of his chateau. 

Yera looked at him, hesitated, then rose and approached him. 

“ Sergius,” she said, in a low voice, “ I spoke wrongly to you to 
day. I beg your pardon.” 

Zouroff started a little, and looked down in surprise at the 
proud delicate face of his wife as the moonlight fell on it. 

“ You are not going to make me a scene?” he said, irritably 
and apprehensively. 

On the lofty yet wistful mood of Yore the words fell like drops 
of ice. A momentary recollection had moved her to something 
like hope that her husband might make her duty less penance and 
less pain to her, by some sort of sympathy and comprehension. 
She had bent her temper to the concession of a humility very rare 
with her, and this was all her recompense She checked the re- 
ply that rose to her lips, and kept her voice serene and low. 

“ I do not wish to annoy you in any way,” she said, simply; 
“ I saw that I was wrong to-day — that I had failed in the respect 
I owe you; I thought I ought to confess it and beg your pardon.” 

Zouroff stared at her with his gloomy, sullen eyes. She looked 
very fair to him as she stood there with the silvery rays of the 
moon on her bent face and her white throat and breast; and yet 
she had lost almost all charm for him, whilst the ugliness of 
Jeanne de Sonnaz kept his sluggish passions alive through many 
years. He stared down on her, scarcely thinking at all of her 
words, thinking only, as men do every hour and every century, 
why it was that the pure woman wearies and palls, the impure 
strengthens her chains with every night that falls. It is a 
terrible truth, but it is a truth. 

“How lovely she is !” he thought; “ her mouth is a rose, her 
eyes are stars, her breasts are lilies, her breath i3 the fragrance 
of flowers; and — I like Casse-une-Croute better, who is the color 
of copper, and smells of smoke and brandy as I do l” 

That was what he was thinking. 

Yera looked away from his face outward to the sea, and laid her 
hand for a moment on his arm. 

“It is three years ago,” she said, wistfully, “I did not know 


MOTHS. 


180 


very well what I did; I was only a child; now I do know — I 
would do otherwise. But there is no going back. I am your 
wife. Will you help me a little to do what is right ? I try 
always ” 

Her voice faltered slightly. 

Her husband’s mind came out from his thoughts of Casse-une* 
Croute and Duchesse Jeanne, and realized that she was asking 
him for sympathy. He stared, then felt a passing heat of sullen 
shame, then thrust away the emotion and laughed. 

“ My dear,” he said, with the cynical candor that was rather 
brutality than sincerity, “ three years ago we both made a great 
mistake. Every one who marries says the same. But we must; 
make the best of it. I am a rich man and an indulgent one, and 
that must content you. You are a lovely woman, and a cold 
one, and that must content me. If you bear me living sons you 
will do all a wife wants to do, and if I pay your bills and allow 
you to amuse yourself in your own way I do not see that you 
can complain of me. The less we are alone, the less likely are 
we to quarrel. That is a conjugal maxim. And do not make 
me serious scenes of this sort. They tire me, and I have no wish 
to be rude to you. Will you not go to your room? You look 
fatigued.” 

Yere turned away, and went into the house. Her husband re- 
mained on the terrace, sending the smoke of his great cigar out 
on to the moonlit sea-scented air. 

“She grows sentimental,” he said to himself; “it is better 
stopped at once. Can she not be content with her chiffons and 
her jewels?” 

The following day the Parisian contingent filled the chateau, 
and from morn till night the mirth and movement of a gay 
house-party spoiled for the mistress of Felicite its woodland 
beauty and its sea-shore freshness. 

Never to escape from the world grew as wearisome, as ter- 
rible to Yere as the dust of the factory to the tired worker, as 
the roar of the city streets to the heart-sick seamstress. Never 
to escape from it, never to be alone with the deep peace of nat- 
ure, with the meditations of great dead poets, with the charm of 
lonely and noble landscape — this seemed to her as sad and as 
dreary as, to the women who surrounded her, it would have 
seemed to have been condemned to a year without lovers and 
rivals, to a solitude without excitement and intrigue and success. 
To have a moment alone was their terror; never to have a mo- 
ment alone was her torture. The difference of feeling made a 
gulf between her and them that no equality of beauty and ac- 
complishment and position could bridge. There was no sym- 
pathy possible between Vere and the pretty painted people of 
her world. 

Useless as butterflies; corroding as moths; untrue even to lovers 
and friends, because incapable of understanding any truth; caring 
only for physical comfort and mental intoxication; kissing like 
Judas, and denying in danger like Peter; tired of living, yet afraid 
of dying; believing, some in priests and some in physiologists, 
but none at all in virtue; sent to sleep by chlorodine and "kept 


MOTHS. 


m 

awake by raw meat and dry wines; cynical at twenty, and ex 
hausted at thirty, yet choosing rather to drop dead in the harness 
of pleasure than fall out of the chariot-race for an instant; taking 
their passions as they take sherry in the morning and bitters be- 
fore dinner; pricking their sated senses with the spices of lust or 
jealousy, and calling the unholy fever love; having out- worn 
every form of excitement except the gambler's, which never palls, 
which they will still pursue when they shall have not areal tooth 
in their mouths nor a real hair on their heads, the women of 
modern society are perhaps at once the most feverish and the 
most frivolous, the basest and the feeblest, offspring of a false 
civilization. 

There is no harm in them; that is the formula of society; there 
is no harm in them; only, at times, Medea looks almost holy, and 
Clytemnestra almost healthy, beside them. 

When one remembers that they, and those whom they so 
strongly resemble — who are a proscribed race, which they are 
not — are the only types of their sex that most men in society 
ever see, it is easy to understand why the old religion that made 
motherhood divinity loses its last hold on humanity, and the new 
Positivism, that would make womanhood holy, gains no in- 
fluence on the mass of modem minds. 

Amidst these women Vere was like the marble of a Greek 
statue amidst the Sale statuettes and Palais Royal dolls of a 
bazaar stall. 

She had no standing point in common with them, except her 
social rank. Their jargon, their laughter, their rivalries, their 
pleasures, were all alike distasteful to her. When she drove 
over with them to Trouville at five o’clock and sat amidst them, 
within a stone’s throw of what the horrible pleasantry of society 
calls the jolies impures , she thought that the levee that the pro- 
scribed sisterhood held on those sands was quite as good as the 
levee of the great ladies around her. 

In return women hated her. “She is so farouche ,” they said. 
They only meant that she was chaste, and that perfect chastity 
of thought, as well as of act, which the whole tone and tenor of 
society destroys in its devotees and ridicules in the few cases 
where it cannot be destroyed. 

Only Jeanne de Sonnaz professed to admire, nay, to love, her. 
But then every one knew that Madame Jeanne was a clever 
woman, who said nothing and did nothing without a reason. 

“Try to be amiable — if you know how to be amiable — with 
Madame de Sonnaz,” bad been the command of Zouroff to his 
wife on the first day that she and the French duchess had met; 
and Yere had been indebted to the brilliant Parisienne for many 
a word of social counsel, many an indication of social perils, 
where the stiff frivolities of etiquette were endangered, or a dif- 
ficult acquaintance required tact to conciliate or rebuff it. Yere 
believed innocently and honestly that Jeanne de Sonnaz liked 
her, and was angered with and reproached herself for not being 
sufficiently grateful, and for being unable fully to return the xq 
gard. 


MUTUS, 191 

8 ‘ I think she is not a good woman,” she said once, hesitatingly, 
to her sister-in-law. 

Madame Nelaguine smiled a little grimly, with a look th?tfc 
made her resemble her brother. 

“ My dear, do not be too curious about goodness. If you in- 
quire so much for it, it will lead you into as much trouble as the 
pursuit of the Sangreal did the knights of old; and I am afraid 
you will not find it. As for Jeanne, she is always in her choir 
at the Messe des Paresseux at the Madeleine, she turns the lot- 
tery-wheel at fetes for the poor, and her husband has always 
lived with her. What more can you want ? Do not be too ex- 
acting.” 

Yere vaguely felt that Madame Nelaguine thought anything 
but well of her friend ; but she got no more information, and 
Madame Jeanne came most days over to Felicite and said to all 
there, “ How lovely is Yere! — odd, cold, inhuman, yes ; but one 
adores her.” 

One morning Yere, risen several hours before her guests, felt a 
yistful fancy, that had often visited her, to try and find again 
that little nest of fishers’ cottages where she had eaten the cher- 
ries and heard Correze sing in rivalry to the lark. It was a wish 
so innocent and harmless that she saw no reason to resist it ; she 
had her ponies ordered while the day was still young, and drove 
out of her own park-gates down to Deauville and Trouville, and 
through them and along the road to Yillerville. At Yillerville 
she left her ponies, and walked with no escort except Loris 
through the sea of greenery that covers the summit of the table- 
land of Calvados, while the salt sea washes its base. 

The name of this little village she had never known, but, 
guessing by the position it had been in above the sea, she knew 
that it must have been somewhere between Grand Bee and Yil- 
lerville; and she followed various paths through orchards, and 
grass-meadows, and corn-fields divided by lines of poplars, 4 and at 
last found the lonely place quite unchanged. 

The old woman who had called him Saint Raphael was knit- 
ting by the fence of furze; the cherry-trees were full of fruit; 
the cabbage-roses were pushing their dewy heads against the 
tiny roses of the sweet-brier; sunburnt children were dragging 
nets over the short grass; the lark was singing against the sky. 
Nothing had changed except herself. 

No one of them recognized her. 

The old woman gave her a frank good-morrow, and the chil- 
dren stared, but no one of them thought that this great lady, 
with the gold-headed cane, and the old lace on her white skirts, 
was the child that had sat there two years before and drunk the 
milk in its wooden bowl and worn the wooden shoes. She asked 
for a little water, and sat down by the sweet-brier hedge; and 
was thinking of Correze. He was seldom absent from her 
thoughts; but he remained so pure, so lofty, so ideal a figure 
in her fancy, that his empire over her memory never alarmed 
her. 

He was never to her like other men. 

She sat and listened, with divided attention, to the garrulity 


192 


MOTHS. 


of the old, white-capped woman, who went on knitting in the 
sun, against her wall of furze, and chatting cheerfully, needing 
no reply. They were hard times, she thought. People had said 
with the republic there would be no poor, but she could see no 
difference herself; she had lived through many of them — mean- 
ing governments — but they were each as bad as the other, she 
thought. Bread was always dear. The monies were plentiful 
this year; the republic had no hand in that; and the deep-sea 
fishing had been very fair, too. Did madame see that lark? The 
little fool of a bird brought her in as much as the vioulea ; a gen- 
tleman had taken such a fancy to it that he came and saw it was 
safe every summer, sometimes oftener; and he always left her 
five napoleons or more. There were so many larks in the 
world, or would be if people did not eat them; she could not tell 
what there was about hers, but the gentleman always gave her 
money because she let it live in the grass. Perhaps madame had 
heard of him; he had a beautiful face; he was a singer, they 
said; and to hear him sing — she had heard him once herself — it 
was like heaven being opened. 

Vere listened with undivided attention now, and her eyes grew 
soft and dim. 

“ Does he remember like that?” she thought; and it seemed to 
her so strange that he should never have sought to speak to her. 

“ Does he come for the lark only?” she asked. 

“ He says so,” answered the old woman. “ He always takes a 
rose and a bit of sweet-brier. The first day he was here there 
was a pretty girl with him, that he bought sabots for, because 
she had lost her shoes on the beach. Perhaps the girl may be 
dead. I have thought so sometimes; it cannot be only for the 
lark; and he sits here a long time, a long time — and he is sad. 
He was here a day in May — that was the last.” 

The warmth of a sudden blush came over her hearer’s proud 
face. She did not know what she felt; she felt a thrill of alarm, 
a strange pleasure, a vague trouble. She rose at once, and left a 
little money in the lean hand, as she bade the old peasant good- 
day, called Loris from his chase of chickens, and began to retrace 
her way to Villerville. i 

The old woman looked after her along the flat path over the 
turf that went on under the apple-trees, and through the wheat- 
fields, till it joined the road to Grand Bee. 

“Now I think of it,” she muttered to her knitting-needles, 
“that great lady has the eyes of that tired child who had the 
wooden shoes. Perhaps she is the same — only dead that way — < 
dead of being stuffed with gold, as so many of them are.” 

“Granny, that is the Russian princess from Felicite,” said a 
fisherman who was coming up over the edge of the rocks, hang- 
ing his nets on the poles, and saw the tall slender figure of Vere 
going through the tall green corn. 

; “Ay, ay!” said the old woman. “Well, she has given me a 
gold bit. Never was a bird that brought so much money from 
the clouds as my lark.” 

! Her son laughed. “I saw your other lark in Trouville thi3 
morning; he had come by the Havre packet Jirom England. He 


MOTHS. 


m 

knew me, and asked for you all. He said he would only st’-y 
here an hour on his way to Paris, but would soon be back again, 
and then would come and see you. They took all my fish at the 
Roches Noires, just at a word from him to the porter in the hall.” 

“ Tiens!” said the old woman, thoughtfully, and she kept her 
thoughts to herself. 

“ Where have you been, O via belle matinale?” said the Duch- 
esse Jeanne, as Vere went up the steps of the sea-terrace to enter 
the anteroom of Felicite, where the duchess, just down-stairs at 
twelve o’clock, was breathing the morning air in the most charm- 
ing of dressing-gowns — a miracle of swans’ down and old Mech< 
lin, with a knot here and there of her favorite cardinal red. 

Zouroff was with her; both were smoking. 

“ I have been a long drive,” answered Yere: “ you know Iris© 
early.” 

“ Where did you go?” asked Zouroff, brusquely. “ I object to 
those senseless Jong drives in the country.” 

“I went as far as Villerville,” she answered. “ I went to see 
a few fisher-people that live on the coast near there.” 

The hour before she would have said it without any other 
thought than what her words expressed. 

Now her remembrance of what the woman had said of Correze 
made her hesitate a little, and a certain color came into her face, 
that both her husband and her guest noticed. It seemed to the 
exquisite and loyal truthfulness of her temper that she had been 
guilty of a thing even meaner than a falsehood — a reservation. 

“It was where I lost my way the first day I was with my 
mother,” she said, and turned to her husband, as making the ex- 
planation only to him. “Perhaps you remember? Every one 
laughed about it at the time.” 

“ I think I remember,” said Zouroff, moodily. “ It could 
scarcely be worth a pilgrimage.” 

“ Unless she have a carte tendre du pays,” said the duchess, 
with a little laugh. “Oh, a million pardons, my sweet Vera; 
you never permit a jest, I know.” 

“ I permit any jest if it be witty and have no offense in it,” 
said Yere, very coldly. “ If you and the prince will allow me, X 
will go in-doors: I am a little tired and dusty, and Loris is more 
than a little.” 

“ You had no intention in what you said, Jeanne?” muttered 
Zouroff to his companion, when Yere had entered the house. 
Ci You cannot possibly mean ” 

“Mean I Of your pearl of women, your white swan, your em- 
blem of ice? What should I mean? It amused me to see her look 
angry; that is all. I assure you, if you made her angry much 
oftener, she would amuse you much more. Do you know, do 
you know, mon vieux, I should not be in the least surprised if, 
a few years later, you were to become a jealous husband! How 
funny it will be! But really you look quite Oriental in your 
wrath just now. Be angry more often. Believe me, your wife 
will entertain you more — especially as she will never deserve it.” 

Leaving that recipe behind her, fraught with all the peril it 
might bear, Madame Jeanne dragged her muslins and her Mech # 


194 


MOTHS . 


lin over the marbles of the terrace, and went also within-doors 
to attend to the thousand-and-one exigencies of a great spectacle 
which she had conceived, and was about to give the world. 

It was a Kermesse for the poor— always for the poor. 

Madame Jeanne, who was a woman of energy, and did not 
mind trouble (she had been one of the leaders of a regime that 
dressed seven times a day), was the head and front, the life and 
soul, of her forthcoming Kermesse, and was resolute to leave no 
pains untaken that should make it the most successful fancy fair 
of its season. She had already quantities of royalties promised 
her as visitors. Poor Citron had pledged herself to preside at a 
puppet-show; “ tout la gomme ” would be golden lambs to be 
shorn; and all the great ladies, and a few of the theatrical celeb- 
rities, were to be vendors, and wear the costumes and the 
jewelry of Flemish peasantry. 

“ I have written to beg Correze to come, but he will not,’' she 
said, once, in the hearing of Vere. “ He used to be at Trouville 
every year, but he never comes now. I suppose some woman he 
cares about goes elsewhere.” 

She was very provoked, because she wanted to have a grand 
mass at Notre Dame des Victoires, and “quetter” afterward; 
and if Correze would have sung some Noel or some Salutaris 
Hostia, it would have brought hundreds more napoleons into her 
plate for the poor; so, angrily, she abandoned the idea of the 
mass, and confined herself to the glories of the Kermesse. 

Vere, to whom the mingling of the poor with a fancy fair, and 
the confusion of almsgiving with diversion, always seemed as 
painful as it was grotesque, took no heed of all the preparations, 
and received in silence her husband’s commands to take a place in 
it. He was peremptory, and she was always obedient. She wrote to 
her people in Paris to send her down all that was necessary, and 
after that ceased to occupy herself with a folly she secretly dis- 
approved — a mockery of the misery of the world which made her 
heart ache. 

The day before the first opening of the Kermesse, which was to 
eclipse every other show of the sort, Prince Zouroff, with his wife 
and sister and most of their guests, drove over to Trouville to see 
the arrangements. Madame Jeanne had erected her pretty 
booths in the glades of the Comte dTIautpoul, and had had 
that charming park conceded to her for her merry-go-rounds, 
her lotteries, her diseurs de bonnes aventures, her merry andrews, 
and her other diversions. Madame Jeanne’s taste was the taste of 
that Second Empire under which the comet of her course had 
reached its perihelion; but the effect of her taste in this little 
canvas city of pleasure was bright, brilliant, and picturesque, 
and the motley colors in which she delighted made a pretty 
spectacle under the green leaves of the trees. Every booth had 
the name of the lady who would officiate at it blazoned above; 
and above the lottery-booth was written “ Madame de Sonnaz,” 
with a scarlet flag that bore her arms and coronet fluttering 
against the blue sky. The next was the Marquise de Merilhac’s 
green and primrose; the next the Countess Schondorff’s amber 


MOTHS . 


195 


and violet; the next, of pale blue, with a pale blue pennon, and 
the arms and crown in silver, was the Princess Zouroff’s. 

“ It is exceedingly pretty,” said Yere, as she stood before the 
little pavilion. 

There were about ten others, all in divers hues, with their 
pennons fluttering from tall Venetian masts. The pretty booths 
stood about in a semi-oval where the sward was green and the 
trees were tall. Servants were bringing in all the fanciful 
merchandise that was to be for sale on the morrow; a few gen- 
darmes had been sent to protect the fair during the night; some 
children, with flying hair and fluttering skirts, and some baby- 
sailors, were at play on the real wooden horses which the duch- 
ess had had down from St. Cloud. 

• 4 Xt is extremely pretty,” said Yere, courteously, to the pro- 
tectress, and protectress of it all, and her eyes glanced round the 
semicircle. Immediately facing hers was a booth of white 
stripes and rose-color, looped up with great garlands of pink 
roses; the flag above had no arms, but, instead, had a device in 
gold, a squirrel cracking nuts, with the motto, “Vivent les bra - 
conniers!” It was a device known to tout Paris, except to Yere; 
but even she knew the name underneath, which she read in the 
glow of the late afternoon light — 

“Mademoiselle Noisette.” 

She stood in the entrance of her own pavilion and saw it. 
Her face grew very white, and a haughty indignation blazed in 
her grand, grave eyes. 

Madame Jeanne, standing by, and chattering volubly, with 
her eyeglasses up to her eyes saw the look and rejoiced in her 

soul. 

“ It will be amusing,” she said to herself. “ How very angry 
quiet people can be!” 

Yere, however, disappointed her. She made no scene; she 
remained still and tranquil, and, in a clear voice, gave a few 
directions to the servants whe were arranging the contents of 
her own pavilion. 

Madame Jeanne felt the pang an archer feels when, v.t a great 
public fete, the arrow aimed for the heart of the gold misses its 
mark and strikes the dust. 

It was to be chagrined like this that she, Duchesse de Sonnaz, 
and daughter of the mighty Maison de Merilhac, had stretched 
her Second Empire laxities so far as to permit on the grounds of 
her own Kermesse the Free Lances of the Paris theaters! 

Nothing was said; nothing was done; Madame Jeanne felt 
cheated, and her Kermesse seemed already shorn of its splendor. 

Vere remained very calm, very still; she did not move outside 
the curtains of her own azure nest. 

“ Guilt hath pavilions and no secrecy,” murmured the Princess 
Nadine, changing the well-known line by a monosyllable, as she 
glanced across at the pink-and white booth with its peccant 
squirrel. But she murmured it only in the ear of a tried and 
trusty old friend, the Count Schondorff, who for more years than 
§he would have cared to count had been her shadow and heff 


196 


MOTHS. 


slave, her major-domo and her souffre-douleur . “I am so glad 
Vere takes it so well,” she thought, with relief. 

A little later there came into the pink tent a handsome woman 
in a black dress, with knots of pink; she had a domelike pile of 
glistening hair, gorgeous beauty, a splendid bust; she looked like 
a rose-hued rhododendron made human. 

It was Noisette. She bustled and banged about rather noisily, 
and laughed loudly with theonen accompanying her, and scolded 
the servants unpacking her packages. 

“ V’la la petite /” said Noisette, as she looked across the sward 
at the azure pavilion. She always said the same thing when she 
saw the Princess Zouroff . 

In a good-natured scornful way Noisette pitied her. 

The sunset hour wore away, and Vere had made no sign that 
she had seen the name beneath the golden squirrel and the woman 
whose badge the poaching squirrel was. 

Madame de Sonnaz was disappointed and perplexed. She had 
seen the look in Yere’s eyes, and as she thought her cold, but not 
tame, she wondered that she bore the insult so passively. She 
drove homeward with them to dine at Felicite and pass the night 
there. 

“ Surely it will be a great success to-morrow,” she cried, glee- 
fully. “ Oh, mon Dieu! how tired I am! — and how much more 
tired I shall be!” 

“You are too good to the poor,” said Yere, with an intonation 
that the duchess did not admire. 

“ She will be unbearable when she is a little older,” she said to 
herself. 

Yere reached her home, changed her dress for dinner, went 
down with the light on her opals and in her eyes — which had a 
dark stern look in them, new there — and bore herself throughout 
the dinner with that cold grace, that lofty simplicity which had 
gained her the name of the Alpine flower. 

‘ ‘I suppose she accepts the thing with the rest,” thought Madame 
Jeanne, as she sat on the right hand of Zouroff; and she felt bit- 
terly angry with herself for having stooped to open the pavilions 
of her fancy fair to the dramatic sisterhood, even though it were 
in the pr^e interests of charity. 

t After dinner, when her people were scattered about — some 
playing cards, some merely flirting, some listening to the choral 
and orchestral music that the choice taste of Madame Nelaguine 
had always made a constant charm of the house-parties of Felic- 
ite — Sergius Zouroff, as he passed one moment from the card- 
room to the smoking-room, was stopped by his wife. She stood 
before him with her head erect, her hands crossed on a large fan 
of feathers. 

“ Monsieur,” she said, very calmly, though her voice was alto- 
gether unlike what it had been on the terrace the night of their 
return — “monsieur, you desired me to take part in the so-called 
Kermesse to-morrow?” 

“ Certainly,” said Zouroff, as he stared at her. 

^ 44 Then,” she said, very quietly still, “you will see that the 


MOTHS 


197 


fiorflion of the actress, Mademoiselle Noisette, is taken down, or 
differently occupied. Otherwise, I do not go to mine.’* 

Zouroff was silent from utter amazement. He stared at her 
blankly. 

“ What did you say?” he said, savagely, after some moments* 
silence. “ What did you say? Are you mad?” 

“I think you heard very well what I said,” replied Vere. 
“All I have to say is that if Mademoiselle Noisette be present I 
shall not be. That is for you to decide.” 

Then, without any more words, or even any look at him, she 
passed on into the music-room, and joined some other ladies. 

Sergius Zouroff stood and stared after her. He felt much the 
same emotion as his ancestors might have felt when some serf, 
whom they had been long used to beat and torture, rose up and 
struck them in return. What did she know of Noisette ? He sup- 
posed that she must know all since she took no exception to the two 
other actresses, who were permitted to take part in the Kermesse 
of the grandes dames . 

He did not care what she knew — or he thought he did not; 
but he cared bitterly that she should dare to affront and defy 
him, dare to make him what he termed a scene, dare to erect 
her will in opposition to his own. And, amidst all the turbu- 
lence of anger, self-will, was a sullen sense of shame, a conscious- 
ness that his life was no more fit to be mated with hers than the 
lips of a drunkard are fit to touch an ivory chalice of consecrated 
wine. 

He sought his sister. 

“Nadine,” he said, sharply, “have you ever told Vere of 
Noisette?” 

Madame Nelaguine glanced at him with some contempt. 

“ I? do I ever talk? do I ever do anything but what is rational?” 

“Who has, then?” 

“ Has any one? Probably le tout Paris , everybody and nobody. 
What is the matter?” 

“The matter! She has made me a scene. She declares that 
if Noisette be in her booth to-morrow she will not go to her own. 
She is not the ignoramus that you think.” 

“ After three years as your wife, Sergius, how should she be? 
I am sorry she lias begun to observe these things. I will speak 
to her, if you like. Unless you will withdraw Noisette.” 

“Withdraw Noisette! do you suppose she ever listens to me? 
do you suppose I should not be the laughing-stock of all society 
if I quarreled with her to please Vera’s caprices?” 

“ If you annoyed youi mistress to avoid insulting your wife? 
Society would laugh at you? Yes, I suppose it would. What a 
nice world it is!” thought the Princess Nadine, as she said aloud, 
“ I will see Vera. But she is difficult to persuade. And you will 
pardon me, Sergius, but here I do think she is rather right. It 
is not good form to have Mademoiselle Noisette or Mademoiselle 
anybody else of the same — adventurous — reputation mixed up 
with ws in any affair of this kind.” 

“ Perhaps not,” said Zouroff, roughly. “ But Jeanne chose tQ 


198 


MOTHS 


have it so. She thought they would attract. So they will; and 
it is no more than having their carriages next yours in the Bois.” 

“Or our lovers and brothers and husbands in their dressing- 
rooms,” thought Madame Nelaguine. “You are not very just, 
Sergius,” she said, aloud. “ Jeanne may have a will of her own, 
Noisette may have one, anybody; but not Vera.” 

“ Yera is my wife,” said Prince Zouroff. 

To him it seemed as clear as day that all the difference between 
these women was thus expressed. 

“You are quite resolved, then,” she said, with some hesita- 
tion, “not to see any justice in this objection of Vera’s, not to 
give in to it, not to contrive in some way to secure the absence 
of Mademoiselle Noisette to-morrow?” 

“Nadine Nicolai wna!” cried her brother, in wrath. “After 
forty years that we have been in this world, do you know me so 
little that you want to ask such a thing? After Vera’s insolence 
I would drag Noisette to that pavilion to-morrow if she were 
dying!” 

“ Will you drag your wife?” said Madame Nadine, with a little 
disgust; but Zouroff had left her, and was on his way to the smok- 
ing-room. 

“He is nothing but a spoilt child grown big and brutal,” 
thought his sister, with a little shrug of her shoulders. “ Howl 
wish he had married a diablesse like Jeanne!” 

An hour later, when the ladies all went to their rooms, Madame 
Nelaguine asked entrance for a moment at Vere’s door, and with- 
out beating about the bush, said simply — 

“ My dear, Sergius has asked me to speak to you about the 
Kermesse to-morrow. Now I think I know all that actuates youg, 
and I will admit that my own feeling is quite with you; but it is 
too late now to alter anything: Sergius is obstinate, as you know 
— especially obstinate if he fancy his will is disputed. This ob' 
jection of yours can only lead to scenes, to disputes, to differ 
ences, very trying, very useless, and — worst of all — very divert- 
ing to others. Will you not abandon the point? It is not you 
that the presence of this person at the fair will shame, but him- 
self?” 

Vere heard quite patiently; her maid, who did not understand 
English, which Madame Nelaguine, like most Russians, spok© 
admirably, was brushing out her thick bright hair. 

“ It was my fault not to attend more to the details of the 
thing,” she answered; “ but I had heard nothing of Mademoiselle 
Noisette being permitted in the park. It is your brother’s shame, 
certainly; but if I submitted to so public an insult as that, I 
should be, I think, scarcely higher than Mademoiselle Noisette 
herself. We will not talk about it; it is of no use: only, unless 
you can tell me that her name and her flag are withdrawn 
from the pavilions, I do not stir from here to-morrow. That is 
all.” 

“ Ah!” ejaculated Madame Nadine, very wearily. “ My dear, 
have you any conception of what Sergius can be, can do, when he 
is crossed? Believe me, I am not defending him for an instant; 
no one could; but I have seen twice as long a life as you have 


MOTHS . . 


m 

Vera, and X have never seen any good come of the wife’s indig- 
nation in these cases. Society may go with her for the moment, 
but it deserts her in the long run. Her husband is embittered by 
the exposure, and he has always a strength she has not. The 
world does not insist that a wife shall have Griselda’s virtue or 
Griselda’s affection, but it does insist that she shall have Griselda’s 
patience. Noisette, and a thousand Noisettes, if your 
husband forget himself for them, cannot hurt you in the eyes of 
the world; but one rash moment of indignation and rupture may 
be your ruin.” 

Vere lifted her face, with all its loosened hair like a golden 
cloud about it, and her look was very cold and contemptuous, 
and almost hard in its scorn. 

“ Dear princess,” she said, very briefly and chillily, “ I did not 
wish to trouble you on this subject. You are not to blame for 
your brother’s vices, or for my marriage. Only, pray under- 
stand, since we do speak of it, that my mind is quite made up. 
If Mademoiselle Noisette be permitted to be present at the park 
to-morrow, I shall be absent. I was a child three years ago, but 
I am not a child now.” 

Madame Nelaguine sighed. 

“ Of course you know everything, dear; women always do, 
even when nobody says a syllable to them. You are wronged, 
wounded, insulted; all that I admit with sorrow. But what I 
want to persuade you is, that this method of avenging yourself 
will do no sort of good. You will only give a triumph to Noi- 
sette; you will only give a laugh to your friends and your enemies 
— for friends and enemies are so sadly alike in the way they look 
at one’s misfortunes! My dear child, society has settled all these 
things; the belles petites are seen everywhere except just in our 
drawing-rooms; they will be soon there also, perhaps. The fic- 
tion of society is, that we know nothing of their existence; the 
fact of society is, that they are our most powerful and most 
successful rivals and dispute each inch of ground with us. Now, 
wise women sustain the fiction and ignore the fact, like society. 
I want you to be one of these wise ones. It ought to be easy to 
you, because you have no love for Sergius.” 

A very bitter look came for the moment on Vere’s face. She 
raised her head once more with a very proud gesture. 

“ Let us say no more, Nadine. I have self-respect. I will not 
be a public spectacle vis-a-vis with one of Prince Zouroff’s mis- 
tresses. He can choose whether he sees her in her pavilion or 
me in mine. He will not see both. Good-night.” 

Sorrowful, discomfited, baffled, but knowing that her sister- 
in-law had justice on her side, though not prudence, the Prin- 
cess Nelaguine went to her own chamber. 

‘‘War has begun,” she thought; and she shuddered, because 
she knew her brother’s temper. When he was ten years old she 
had seen him strangle a pet monkey because the small creature 
disobeyed him in his tricks. 

Madame Nelaguine awoke in the morning feverish with anx- 
iety. She was not a good woman, but she had honor in her, and 
was capable of affection. She had begun to detest her brother 


MOTHS. 


UOO 

and to care much for his wife. The’day was clear and warm— 
not too warm — and a strong soft wind was tossing the white foam 
of the sea, and would blow brightly on the pretty pennons of the 
Kermesse pavilions. Yere rose earlier than anyone, as her habit 
was, and walked out into the garden with Loris by her side. 
She was not in any way anxious; her mind was made up; and 
of anything that her husband might say or might do she had 
no fear. 

** At the utmost he could but kill me,” she thought, with a lit- 
tle contemptuous derision; “and that would not matter very 
much. No Herbert of the Border was ever insulted yet.” 

She walked over the grass above the sea, where the rose-thickets 
grew and the whole coast could be seen from the Honfleur to the 
Rochers de Calvados. It was rather a rampart than a terrace, 
and the waves beat and fretted the wall below. 

It was only nine o’clock: no one except herself rose so early at 
Felicite. 

As she walked, a stone fell at her feet. A letter was tied 
to it. Instinctively she took it up, and on the note she read her 
own name. She hesitated a moment, then opened it. The writ- 
ing she did not know, It was very brief, and only said — 

“ Mademoiselle Noisette was called to Paris last night. The 
Princess Zouroff is entreated by a humble well-wisher not to dis- 
turb herself any more on this matter. She can honor the Kermesse 
in safety.” 

Vere read it, and stood still in wonder. Could it be from the 
actress herself? 

The writing was that of a man, elegant, free, and clear. 

She leaned over the gray stone wall of the garden and searched 
the shore with her eyes. In a little skiff was a fisherman row- 
ing hard. She called to him, but he did not hear, or would not 
hear. She did not see his face, as it was bent over the oars. 

“ He must have thrown me the letter,” she thought. 

She felt rather annoyed than relieved. She would have been 
glad to have had cause to strike the blow in public; she was 
weary of bearing patiently and in silence the faithless life of 
Zouroff. 

“If it be true, I am sorry,” she thought, doubtfully, and then 
felt angered that any one should presume so to address her, and 
tore the note in two and threw it in the sea below. 

She went and paid her morning visit to her horses, to her hot- 
houses, to the rest of the gardens, and at eleven returned, with 
neither haste nor interest, to the house. 

People were just down-stairs, being a little earlier that day by 
reason of the Kermesse. The Duchesse Jeanne — already in her 
Flemish dress with wonderful gold ornaments that she had 
bought once of a Mechlin peasant, an exquisite high cap, and 
bright-red stockings and real sabots — was very eagerly chatter- 
ing, explaining, laughing, frowning, vociferating. 

Zouroff stood behind her, his brow as dark as a thunder-cloud. 

When his wife came in sight, a silence fell upon the group 
about the wooden shoes of the duchess. 


MOTHS. 201 

Mademe Nelaguine, whose grace @f tact never deserted her, 
turned and said easily and indifferently to Yere — 

“ There is a great revolution in our toy kingdom, Yere. Made- 
moiselle Noisette, of the Babil, was called to Paris by the first 
train this morning. The loss is irreparable, they say, for no one 
could act Punch with a handkerchief and a penny whistle like 
this famous person.” 

Vere was silent: those who watched her countenance could 
see no change in it. She felt for the moment both anger and 
disappointment, but she showed neither. 

Zoui’off’s face was very sullen. For the first time in his life he 
had been baffled. 

“To whom do you accord the pavilion?” Yere said very quiet- 
ly to the duchess, who shrugged her shoulders and raised her 
eyebrows in a gesture of despair. 

“The committee at Trouville will have arranged it,” she an- 
swered. “ There has been no time to consult us.” 

Yere said in a low tone to her sister-in-law, “ This is true? Not 
a trick?” 

“Quite true, thank Heaven!” said Madame Nelaguine. “I 
have seen the telegram; you can see it: her director has a new 
pensionnaire who is to play in her own great part, Julie Malmai- 
son; she was beside herself, they say — quite raving; nothing 
would keep her.*' 

At that moment a note was taken to the Duchesse Jeanne, 
who read it and then leaped for joy in her red stockings and her 
wooden shoes. It was from one of her male committee, who 
wrote from the Union Club at Trouville. 

“Correze has come,” she shouted. “He was here an hour or 
two yesterday, and promised them to return for the fair, and he 
has returned, and they have got him to take Noisette’s place! Oh, 
dear! the pity that we did not have the Mass — but he is inimit- 
able at a fair, he always can sell any rubbish for millions and as 
a diseur de bonnes aventures he is too perfect!” 

A slight color came into Yere’s cheeks, which Madame de 
Sonnaz noticed, although no one else did. Yere understood now 
who had penned the letter; who had been the fisher rowing. 

She was bewildered and astonished: yet life seemed a lovelier 
thing than it had seemed possible to her a few hours before that 
it ever could look in her sight. 

Sergius Zouroff said nothing; he had been baffled, and did not 
know whom to fall foul of for his defeat. He said nothing to 
bis wife, but when his eyes glanced at her they were very savage, 
dull, and dark. He would have given half his fortune to have 
bad Noisette still in Trouville. 

“Dearest princess,” whispered Madame de Sonnaz to her, tak- 
ing her aside, “ now this woman is so providentially gone you 
will come, won’t you? Pray do not make a scene; your husband 
is more than sufficiently annoyed as it is. It was all my fault. 
I ought to have objected more strongly to the permission to hold 
ber pavilion, but you see the world is so indifferent nowadays, 
®nd indeed — indeed — I never fancied you knew 

A glow of impatient color flushed Vere’s face. She could beat 


MOTHS, 


her husband's infidelities, hut she oould not endure to hear them 
alluded to by another woman. 

“ I will come,” she said briefly, “ if you think it will prevent 
any annoyance. The whole of life seems to be to avoid what 
you all call scenes.” 

“ Of course it is men’s,” said Madame Jeanne. “Women like 
scenes, but men hate them; probably because they are always in 
the wrong and always get the worst of them. I entirely felt 
with you about Mademoiselle Noisette, but I don’t think I should 
have done as you did, spoken as you spoke. It is never worth 
while. Believe me, it never makes the smallest atom of differ- 
ence.” 

“Who told you what I did, what I said?” asked Yere, sudden- 
ly, looking her friend full in the eyes. 

Madame de Sonnaz was, for the moment, a little discon- 
certed. 

“ Only two people knew,” said Yere — “ Nadine and her 

brother.” 

“ It was not Nadine,” said the duchess, recovering her com- 
posure, and laughing a very little. “You ought to know by this 
time, Yera — I may call you Yera? — that your husband has very 
few secrets from me. Sergius and I have been friends so long — 
so horribly long, it makes me feel quite old to count the years 
since I saw him first driving his Orloffs down the Bois. O, le beau 
temps! Morny was not dead, Paris was not republican, hair 
was not worn flat, realism was not invented, and I was not 
twenty. O, le beau temps! Yes, Sergius told me all about tho 
scene you had made him — he called it a scene; I told him it was 
proper feeling, and a compliment to him, and he was extremely 
angry, and I was wretched at my own thoughtlessness. My dear, 
you are so young; you make mistakes; you should never let a 
man think you are jealous, if you are so.” 

“ Jealous!” All the blood of the Herberts of the Border leaped 
to fire in Yere’s veins. As she turned her face upon Madame de 
Sonnaz with unutterable scorn and indignation on it, the elder 
woman did that homage to her beauty which a rival renders so 
reluctantly, but which is truer testimony to its power than all a 
lover’s praise. Madame Jeanne gave a little teasing laugh. 

“ Jealous, my fairest! why, yes. If you were not jealous, why 
should you have insisted on the woman’s absence?” 

“ There can be no jealousy where there is only abhorrence,” 
Yere said, quickly, with her teeth shut. “You do not seem to 
understand; one resents insults for oneself. An insult like that 
is to a woman like the insult that a blow is to a man.” 

Madame Jeanne shrugged her shoulders. 

“My love! Then we are all black and blue, nous aut res. Of 
course, in theory you are quite right, but in practica no one feels 
in such a way; or if any one feels, she says nothing. But we 
will not discuss it, The woman is away. You must come now, 
because you said you would occupy your pavilion if hers were 
taken down. We do not take it down, because there is not time; 
but we have given it to Correze. You know him—in society, I 
mean? I think so,” 


MOTHS. 


“ Scarcely,” said Vere; and she felt a glow of color come over 
her face, because she was sure that the note had come from him, 
and that the fisher pulling his boat had been one with the lute- 
player of Venice. 

“ She has known him, and she does not want to say so,” thought 
Madame Jeanne, swift to observe, swift to infer, and, like all ex- 
perienced people, always apt to make the worst deductions. 

But the bells of the horses, harnessed like Flemish teams to 
the breaks and other carriages, were jingling in the avenue, and 
the tasseled and ribboned postilions were cracking their whips. 
There was little time to be lost, and she reluctantly let Vere 
escape her. As she drove along with Sergius Zouroff in his mail 
phaeton to Trouville, she gave him her own version of Vere’a 
conversation. She exaggerated some things and softened others; 
she gave him full cause to feel that his wife abhorred him; but 
she said nothing of Correze, because she was a prudent tactician, 
and never touched a fruit till it was ripe to fall. 

“ It was possibly merely my fancy,” she reflected, as in all the 
whirl of her lottery, and all the pressure of her admiring throng, 
she found time to cast many glances at the tent of Correze and 
saw that he was never beside his opposite neighbor. He was 
everywhere else — a miracle of persuasiveness, a king of caprice, 
the very perfection of a seller and a showman, dealing in chil- 
dren’s toys with half the shops of the Palais Royal emptied into 
his booth, and always surrounded by a crowd of children, on 
whom he rained showers of sparkling sweetmeats — but he was 
never beside the Princess Zouroff. He had taken down the pen- 
non of Noisette, and in its stead was one with his own device — a 
love whose wings were caught in a thorny rose-bush. He told 
fortunes, he made himself a clairvoyant, he mystified his clients 
and made them happy. He was dressed like a Savoyard, and 
carried an old ivory guitar, and sang strange sweet little ditties in 
a dulcet falsetto. He was the Haroun-al-Raschid of the Trouville 
Kermesse, and poured gold into its treasuries by the magic of 
his name and his voice, the contagion of his laughter and his 
gayety. But he never once approached the Princess Zouroff; 
and iio one could tell that, as he roamed about, with his five- 
year-old adorers flocking after him, or prophesied from a bowl 
of water the destinies of fair women, in his heart he was always 
saying, “Oh, my wild white rose! Why did I not gather you 
and keep you while I could? You are a great lady, and they all 
envy you, and all the while you are outraged and desolate!” 

Vere sat in her azure pavilion, and looked fitter to be a Lily 
of Astolat presiding at a , tournament of knights. She bought 
most of her own things herself, and gave them away to 
children. 

The sun was strong, the heat was great, the chatter, the clam- 
or, the many mingling and dissonant sounds, made her head 
ache, and the pretty, bright rainbow semicircle of tents, and the 
many colors of the changing multitude, often swam as in a mist 
before her eyes. 

Could it, after all, have been he who had warned her? she 
began to doubt. It was too improbable. Why should he care? 


304 


MOTHS . 


pjh© told herself that she had been conjecturing a vain and base- 
less thing. Why should he care? 

He was merely there, in the pavilion that was to have been 
Noisette’s, because, no doubt, all artistes were his comrades; and 
he replaced the actress from the same good-fellowship as he sold 
roses at Madame Lila’s stall, and ivory carvings at Cecile Chal- 
Ion’s. It could have been nothing more. 

He never approached her. She could see his graceful head and 
throat above the throng, as he sold his puppets and his playthings; 
she could hear the thrill of his guitar, the echo of his voice, the 
delighted shouts of his child-troop, the laughter with which 
women pelted him with flowers as in Carnival time; she could 
see him nearly all day long, as he stood under Noisette’s rosy 
garlands or wandered with jest and compliment through the 
fair. But to her he never came. At sunset he was missing. The 
flag, with the Love caught in the thorns of the roses, was down; 
a negro stood like a statue cut in ebony between the pink cur- 
tains of Noisette’s tent. It was a slave of Soudan who had long 
been a free man in his service — a picturesque figure, well known 
to Paris. He did not speak, but he had a scroll in his hands, a 
scroll that hung down, and on which was written, 44 Desole de 
us quitter , metis im pauvre luthier n'est past ma.it re de soi-meme .” 

44 It was charming of Correze,” said Madame de Sonnaz. 
“Verv charming of him. He had only twenty-four Lours lii3 
own between the last night at Covent Garden and the royal 
fetes in Brussels. And he spent those twenty- four Lours in 
answering my call and coming to help our Kermesse. He is 
gone to Belgium to-night. It was really charming. And the 
use he has been! the impetus he gave! the money he has got for 
us! I shall always be grateful to him.” 

Whilst she spoke, she thought nevertheless, 44 It was very elo- 
quent that he should never have gone near her. They must un- 
derstand each other very well, if at all. He never took all that 
trouble for nothing, and no mere accident could have been so 
perfectly apropos .” 

The house-party and the host of Felicite dined at ten o’clock 
that night with her at the Chalet Ludoff. 

Yere, pleading great fatigue, drove homeward in the pah 
moonlight, through the cool air, sweet with the scent of the ap- 
ple-orchards and the sea. Madame Nelaguine accompanied her: 
neither spoke. 

In Paris at that hour, Mademoiselle Noisette, arriving hot with 
the sun, enraged with the dust, furious at leaving Trouville, and 
ready for murder if she could not have vengeance, burst, as the 
hurricane and the storm burst over lake and mountain, into the 
peaceful retreat where the director of her theater passed his leis- 
ure moments, and found that there was no new pensionnaire to 
play Julie Malmaison, that her greatness was on the same unap- 
proachable pinnacle it had occupied ever since her debut, that her 
director and her public alike were the most loyal and submissive 
©f slaves — that in a word, she had been hoaxed. 

44 Qui done a voulu me mystijier /’* she screamed a thousand 
times, and plunged into abysses of suspicion, and was only pao» 


MOTHS. 


m 

Ified by promises of the Chef de Surete and his myrmidons. 
But she stormed, raged, cursed, wept, foamed at the mouth, 
for half an hour, and then — forgot the Prefet de Police, and 
let herself be taken down to Enghien-les-Bains in time for din- 
ner by a German margrave, whom she pillaged from patriot- 
ism, and with whom she stayed a whole week. 

The Duchesse Jeanne, excruciatingly tired as she was the 
next morning, felt her spirits good, and her limbs elastic, as 
she got into her red and black stripes and red cap — vrai bon~ 
net rouge , as she said — and displayed her skill in the waters 
of Trouville, and on them with her canoe. She had got a 
clew to follow — a mere misty, intangible thread at present, but 
still something on which to spin her web. 

“Correze was the hero of the adventure of the lost shoes and 
stockings; and what adventure is ever so sweet in a woman’s 
life as the first?” thought this experienced being, as she lay 
stretched out on the waves, or made her canoe shoot over them. 
“ Correze comes for a few hours down here; that very day she 
drives off before we are up, and makes her pilgrimage to the 
place of the lost shoes; when we interrogate her she colors 
and grows angry: he takes Noisette’s pavilion — Noisette’s, 
whom he detests: I have heard artists say so a hundred times. 
He is charming, he is exquisite, he is adorable; and all within 
a few yards of Yere, to whom he nevertheless never speaks! 
Something there must be. The thing to do is to bring them near 
each other; then one would see inevitably.” 

And, lying on her back on the sunny water, she resolved to do 
bo. What did she want? She did not know precisely. She 
wanted to do what the moths do to ermine. 


CHAPTER XIX. 

Pretty, green Ischl was growing dusky in the evening hours. 
Isclil, like a young girl, is prettiest in the morning. Its morning 
light is radiant and sweet; of the sunset it sees little or nothing, 
and its evenings are sad-colored; the moon seems a long time com- 
ing up over these heights of pine forest, but, when it does come, it 
is very fair, shining on the ripple of the rapid Traun, with the 
lights of the houses on the banks twinkling in the moss-green 
surface of the stream, with every now and then a gentle splash 
breaking the silence as the ferry-boat goes over from side to side 
or a washing-barge is moored in closer to the shore. . 

Ischl is calm, and sedate, and decorous. Ischl is like some 
tender, wholesome, yet patrician beauty in a German picture, 
like the pretty aristocratic Charlotte in Kaulbach’s picture, who 
cuts the bread-and-butter yet looks a patrician. Ischl has noth- 
ing of the belle petite, like her sister of Baden, nothing of the titled 
cocodette, like her cousin Monaco. Ischl does not gamble, or riot, 
or conduct herself madly in any way; she is a little, old-fashioned 
still, in a courtly way; she has a little rusticity still in her elegant 
manners; sf,e is homely whilst she is so visibly of the fine Jleur of 
the vieille souche. # 

ghe is hkft the noble dames of the past ages, who were so high 


m 


MOTHS. 


af rank and so proud of habit, yet w^re not above the distilling 1 
room and the spinning-wheel, who were quite serious, sweet, 
and smelt of the rose-leaves with which they filled their big jars. 

Ischl goes early to bed and early rises. 

It was quite quiet on this August evening. It was very full, 
but its throng was a polite and decorous one. Groups walked 
noiselessly up and down under the trees of the esplanade; music 
had long ago ceased from sounding; men and women sat out on 
the balconies with dimly-lit chambers behind him; but there 
was no louder sound than a dog’s bark, or a girl’s laughter, or 
the swish of an oar in the river. 

From the road of the north-east, and over the gray bridge with 
its canopied saint, there came suddenly, with a sound of tramp* 
ling hoofs, whips cracking in air, and clanging post -horns, that 
harshly broke the repose of the twilight hour, a traveling- 
carriage with four horses, containing two ladies and a dog. . 

The carriage had come from Salzburg. It was open, for the 
night was mild, and as a miracle of kindness, it did not rain.. A 
man leaning in a casement of the Kaiserinn^Elizabeth recognized 
both ladies and dog as the heavy landau rolled off the bridge 
across the road, then disappeared round the corner of the build- 
ing. It was followed by another carriage, full of servants. The 
host of the Kaiserinn Elizabeth, with all his officials small and 
great, precipitated themselves into the street, bowing bareheaded, 
as the fiery horses were pulled up before the door. 

The quick twilight fell; the valleys from dusky grew dark; the 
Traun water began to look like a shoal of emeralds under the sun- 
rays, a white round moon began to show itself behind the hills, 
the forms of people walking on the banks became indistinct, 
though the murmur of their voices and laughter grew clearer, 
otherwise it was so still that he who leaned over his balcony and 
saw the carriage arrive could hear the swish of the barge-ropes 
as the water moved them, and the sound of a big dog lapping in 
the river underneath him. 

“ It is destiny l” he said to himself. “ For two whole years I 
have avoided her, and fate, taking the shape of our physicians, 
sends us here I” 

He leaned over the balcony, and watched the water flow under 
the shadows of the houses and the trees. 

“ Is it Duchesse Jeanne’s doing?” he thought with that unrea- 
soning instinct which in some men and women guides their fancy 
to true conclusions. “That is nonsense, though: what can she 
know? And yet I remember, at that ball, after the Nuit de Mai. 
she seemed to suspect something. She laughed; she told me t 
alone could thaw ice ” 

At that moment an Austrian march, stoutly brayed under the 
windows of the Kaiserinn Elizabeth, seemed to his ears to fill 
the night with discord. 

He started to his feet with impatience and in suffering, as the 
sounds grated in his ears, and rapidly shut his windows one after 
another, to exclude the sound. 

“ Where is Anatole?” he muttered, irritably, as he paced the 
dull chambers allotted to him* He had arrived only twenty 


MOTHS, 


207 


minutes earlier from Lintz. He had not given his name, and for 
once found a spot where he was not known by sight to all. In- 
stead of his servant Anatole, one of the servants of the hotel 
tapped at the door, and, entering his chamber which he himself 
had only entered a few minutes before, presented him, with 
many apologies, a printed document to sign. It was the schedule 
and exordium with which Ischl, in childlike faith in the in- 
tegrity of humanity— or astute faith in its snobbery— requires 
from each of her visitors his declaration of rank and riches, 
and fines him that he may support her promenades and her 
Trinkhalle according to his social means and place. 

He glanced at the paper absently, then took up his pen. Un- 
der' the head of residence, he wrote Un pen parteut ; under that 
of rank he wrote artiste; and under that which required the 
declaration Of his name he wrote Correze” 

Then he threw down five napoleons to pay his fees. “A droll 
document,” he said, as he pushed it away . “It displays great 
astuteness; it never yet found, I am sure, anybody who sought 
immunity from its tax by declaring himself d’un rang inferieur 
ct hors de societe. Really, your tax paper does credit to the 
municipal knowledge of human nature.” 

The waiter smiled and took up the gold. 

“Monsieur gives this for the good of the town?” 

“For the good of the town or the good of yourself,” said Cor- 
reze, “according as altruism or acquisitiveness prevails in your 
organization.” 

The waiter, perplexed, bowed and pocketed the money. 

“Wait a moment. Shall I hear this noise every evening?” 

“The noise?” The waiter was perplexed. 

“You call it music, perhaps!” said Correze. “If I cannot 
have my windows open without hearing it, I must go up into 
the mountains.” 

“ Monsieur will hear it seldom,” said the waiter. “It is the 
chapelle de musiqiie; it serenades royal personages; buit mon- 
sieur will understand that such do not come every day.” 

“It is to be hoped not, if they have ears,” said Correze. “Who 
is it that they are serenading now?” 

“The Princess Zouroff has arrived.” 

“She is not royal.” 

“That is true, monsieur, but almost. The Prince Zouroff is 
so very rich, so very great.” 

“He is not here?” 

“No, monsieur.” 

“What rooms do they give her?” 

“Those immediately beneath monsieur. If they had not been 
engaged for the princess monsieur should have had them,” said 
the youth, feeling that this princely artist should be lodged 
like an ambassador. 

“These do very well,” said Correze. “I shall not change 
them. You may go now. Order my dinner for nine o’clock, 
and send me my own man.” 

Silence had come again, and the chapelle de WM&ique had gone 
its way after its last burst of that melody which) lie great singer 


m 


MOTHS. 


called noise. The stillness was only broken oy the sound of a 
boat passing and the murmur of voices from people sauntering 
Underneath. 

Correze threw himself into a chair that stood in the center of 
the room. 

“ I have honestly tried to avoid her,” he said to himself. “ It 
is Fate!” 

His old and tried servant, Anatole, entered, and began to un- 
pack his things. Correze raised his head. 

“ Put the guitar out,” he said, “ and then go down and see the 
cook, and preserve me from what ills you can; you know what 
it is to dine where German is spoken.” t 

Anatole laid out the guitar-case and opened it, then wen 
obediently. 

He opened one of the casements and looked out; it had become 
almost dark; the tranquil pastoral loveliness was calm and dusky; 
lights twinkled on the opposite bank and jap among the woods; 
the nearer casements were„bright and ruddy above the stream; 
the murmur of voices came from under the indistinct leaf y 
masses of the trees on the esplanade; the sound of oars in water 
made a pleasant ripple. It was a little too much like one of the 
scenes of his own theaters to please him perfectly; he preferred 
wilder scenery, more solitary places; at Ischl the glaciers and 
the ice-peaks, though really near, seem far away, and are seen 
but by glimpses. Yet it was so quiet, so innocent, so idyllic, it 
touched and soothed him. 

“After all,” he thought, “how much we lose in that hot- 
house w r e call the great world!” 

There was a balcony to his chamber. He leaned over it and 
looked down into the one beneath; there the dog, Loris, was 
lying, the starlight shining on his silver-gray hair; beside him on 
a chair there was a bouquet of Alpine roses and a large black fan. 

Correze felt his pulse beat quicker. 

“Kismet!” he said to himself, and the dreamy charm of a 
romantic fatalism began to steal on him. Pure accident has the 
ruling of most of our hours, but, in concession to our weakness 
or to our pride, we call it destiny, and we like to think its caprices 
are commands. 

“ Now she shall have a serenade in truth — a better welcome 
than from the chapelle de musique he said to himself, and -with- 
drew into his own room and took the guitar out of its case — a 
large Spanish guitar that he never traveled without, considering 
its melody a far better accompaniment for the voice than any 
piano could ever be. The organ has all the music of the spheres, 
and the violin all the emotions of the human heart: the organ is 
prayer, the violin is sorrow. The guitar, though but a little 
thing, has passion in it, passion and tenderness and ail the caress 
of love, and, to those who have grown to care for it under 
Southern skies and summer stars, it speaks of love and sighs for 
it, it has told its tale so often where the fireflies flash among the 
lemon- blossoms and the myrtle. 

He took up his guitar, and blew out all the many wax candles 
lighted in his honor, and sat down in the darkness of his chamber. 


MOTHS* 


m 

Then he began to sing— such song as no bribe could get from 
his lips unless he were in the mood to give it. 

Scarcely had the first notes of that incomparable voice rung 
Out clear as a golden bell upon the silent night, than the people 
sauntering on the bridge and before the hotel paused to listen, 
and returned to one another, wondering and entranced. 

“ Who is that?” they cried to one another, and some one 
answered, “ They say Correze came to-night.” Then they were 
quiet, listening, as in the North, where nightingales are few, 
people listen to them. Then several others from farther down 
and farther up the street joined them, and people came from 
under the trees, and from over the bridge; and soon a little 
crowd was gathered there, silent, delighted, and intent. 

“It is Correze at his studies,” the people said one to another; 
and his voice, rising in its wonderful diapason, clearer and 
clearer, higher and higher, rang over the water, and held all its 
hearers spell-bound. As a boat'.passed down the river, the rowers 
paused; and as a great raft pushed its way through the silver of 
the moonlit ripples, the steersman, unbidden, checked it, and 
remained still, lest sound of rope or of chain should break the 
charm. 

The Princess Zouroff, wearily resting in the salon beneath him, 
started as the first notes reached iher, and rose to her feet and 
listened, her heart beating fast. 

There was no other such voice in all the world. She knew that 
he was there as well as though she had seen his face. She went 
to the balcony and stepped out into the moonlight where the dog 
was, and the roses and the fan were on the chair, and leaned 
against the balustrade — a slender, white figure, with ermine 
drawn about her, and the moon-rays shedding their silver around. 

He was singing the “ Salve Dimora.” 

She grew very pale, and her fingers grasped the rail of the 
balcony till her rings hurt her skin. 

Yet how happy she was I 

The river ran by, with a sweet song of its own; the tranquil 
town seemed to sleep; the people gathered below were hushed 
and reverent; the fresh glad wind that lives in Alpine forests 
swept by, bringing the scent of the pine w T ood with it. 

He sang on, the chords of the guitar filling the pauses of the 
voice with a low dulcet sound, as if some answering echo sighed. 
The perfect melody was poured out as from some wild bird’s 
throat, seeming to thrill through the darkness and make it liv- 
ing and beautiful like the shadows of a night that veils the ec- 
, stasies of love. She listened with her head bent and her face 
very pale. It was her welcome, and she felt that it was for her 
—for her alone. 

He sang the “ Salve Dimora ” of that living master, who what- 
ever his weakness or his fault, has in his music that echo oi 
human passion and of mortal pain which more faultless com- 
posers, with their purer science, have missed. Then, scarcely 
pausing, he sang from the great music of the “ Fidelio” and the 
“Iphigenia,” music familiar and beloved with him as any cradle- 
to a child; and he let all his heart go out ir his voice, that 


210 


MOTHS . 


poured itself into the silence of the summer evening, as though, 
like the nightingales, he sang because his heart would break if 
he were silent. Then, last of all, he sang the song of Heine; 
“ Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam.” 

Suddenly, with one deep plaintive chord of the gT-itar, as if its 
strings were breaking with that last sweet sigh, his voice ceased; 
as the nightingale’s may cease all at once, when, amidst the 
roses, it tires of its very plenitude of power. There was the 
sound of a closing casement, then all was still. 

The people, standing entranced below, were silent a moment 
or two, still in the trance of their wonder and delight; then, with 
one accord, they shouted his name with such welcome as they 
never gave but to their own Kaiser. The Kaiser was great, but 
even he could not command that voice at will; and they had had 
the sweetness and the splendor of it all to themselves here, by 
the quiet Traun water, as if it were a bird’s song and no more. 

They cheered him so loudly, and so loudly called on his name, 
that he could do no less than advance on his balcony and thank 
them in their own tongue. Then he bade them good-night, and 
once more closed his window. 

Below, Yere stood quite still, leaning back in the low chair, 
with her fan spread between her face and the upraised eyes of 
the people. She felt great tears fall slowly down her cheeks. 
Yet she was almost happy. 

The fresh forest wind, rising and blowing the green moonlit 
water into rippling silver, seemed to echo around her the song of 
Heine, the song of the palm-tree and the pine. 

The gay brusque tones of Jeanne de Sonnaz roused her almost 
roughly; the duchess came out on to the balcony, muffled in a 
cloak of golden feathers. 

“ Ma chere, how charming I Of course you recognize the voice? 
and, to make sure, I sent the servants to ask. Now we shall 
never be dull. No one is dull where Correze can be seen. It is 
too charmingl And how divinely he sang! I suppose he was 
only studying, though he must know all those things by heart. 
Perhaps he has heard we are underneath him.” 

She spoke in apparent ignorance and surprise, heedlessly and 
ghyly, but her quick eyes read a look that came into Vere’s, and 
for which she was searching. When she had suggested Ischl in 
August to Zouroff for his wife, she had known from Vienna that 
Correze was to pass through there. 

“ I do believe it is as I thought,” said Jeanne de Sonnaz to 
herself. “ Is it possible that she has found the petite entree after 
all? It would be diverting; and why not?” 

When all Ischl awoke the next morning, the day was brilliant; 
the green river sparkled; coffee-cups tinkled on all the balconies; 
the washing-barges were full of white linen, and of women who 
laughed as they worked; ladies, old and young, were borne down 
the walk in their chairs; the little red and white ferry-boat 
trailed along its rope, leaving a track of sunshine; dogs swam; 
children ran about; pretty women, with high heels and high 
canes, sauntered under the tress; green and gray huntsmen 
went by, going ^toward the hills to slay izard and roebuck. It 


M0TH8.\ 


21 \ 


was all yivan, tranquil, picturesque, Watteau- like. That there 
could be anywhere a world full of revolution, speculation, pov- 
erty and socialism, and haste and noise, seemed impossible. At, 
Ischl, life may be still a voyage a Gythere, but not in the reckless 
and frivolous fashion of other places. All remains calm, placid, 
and touched with the graceful decorum of another time than 
ours. The bright Viennese are gay, indeed, as any butterflies can 
be; but still Ischl is Ischl, anc* not Trouville, not Monaco, not 
Biarritz. It is aristocratic, Austrian, and tranquil, and still be- 
longs to an age in which Nihilism and the electric light were un- 
known. 

“ A place to doze and dream in; and how good that is I” 
thought Correze, as he stood out on his balcony an hour after 
sunrise. “ What will the world be like when there are no such 
places? Horrible! but I shall be out of it; that is a supreme 
comfort.” 

Yet, as he thought so, he did not realize that he would ever 
cease to be in the world: who does? Life was still young in him, 
was prodigal to him of good gifts; of enmity, he only knew so 
much as made his triumph finer, and of love he had more than 
enough. His life was full — at times laborious — but always 
poetical and always victorious. He could not realize that the 
day of darkness would ever come for him, when neither woman 
nor man would delight him, when, no roses would have fragrance 
for him, and no song any spell to rouse him. Genius gives 
immortality in another sense than in the vulgar one of being 
praised by others after death; it gives elasticity, unwearied 
sympathy, and that sense of some essence stronger than dealh, 
of some spirit higher than the tomb, which nothing can. 
destroy. It is in this sense that genius walks with the im- 
mortals. 

Correze leaned over his balcony, and watched the emerald-hued 
Traun flow by, and the sun’s rays touch the woods behind the 
water-mill upon the left. His life was of the world and in it, bub 
the mountaineer’s love of nature remained with him. But it was 
not of the woods or the waters or even of the pretty women who 
went by in their chairs to the Trinkhalle, that he was thinking 
now. He was looking at the empty chair in the balcony under- 
neath, and the fan that had lain there all night. 

As he bent down and looked, a knot of edelweiss was flung up- 
ward, and fell at his feet, and a voice that he knew cried out to 
him: “ Good- morning, Correze! You serenaded us divinely, last 
night. Come and breakfast with us at ten o’clock. We live by 
cock-crow here.” 

The voice was the voice of Jeanne de Sonnaz, who came out to 
the balcony that he had been told was Vere’s. Astonished, and 
not pleased, he returned some graceful compliment, and won- 
dered how it was that she was there. The duchess looked up 
nim and laughed; her ugly face looked prettier than many pretty 
women’s. She was in a loose white gown that was all torrents 
and cascades of lace; she had a real moss-rose over her right ear 
and at her bosom; she had little Chinese slippers on, all over 
pearls, with filigree butterflies that trembled above her toes. 


MOTHS. 


212 

“ I cannot see without craning my neck,” she cried to him. 
“ You will come to breakfast. You will meet Yera Zouroff. 
You know her. Doctors say she is ill. I cannot see it. There 
was only one big salon free, so she and I have shared it. A 
pretty place. Were you here before ? A little too like your own 
decor de scene ? Well, perhaps, a valley with a river and chalets 
always has that look: Ems has it. I think it is terribly dull. I 
am glad you are here. Come to us at ten. We are all alone. I 
shall expect you to amuse us.” 

Correze said some pretty nothings with that grace which 
charmed all women; they talked a little of people they knew, 
laughed a little, and were very agreeable. Then the duchess 
went within, and Correze went for a stroll towards the Retten- 
bach mill. 

“ Now I shall see what there is between them,” she said to her- 
self; and he said to himself, “ How can that brute let her be with 
Jeanne de Sonnaz ?” 

Yere, tired, and having had sweet, strange, disturbed dreams, 
had slept later than her wont, then had gone out to the bath and 
the draught prescribed to her: she thought they were useless; 
she felt well. 

Some one dressed in white linen passed her, and bowed lows 
it was Correze. There was a child selling mountain flowers; she 
bought them and carried them on her knee; the polite crowd 
looked after her chair and whispered her name. 

The band was playing under the trees; she did not hear it; 
she heard only the song of Heine. 

When she returned, there was almost a color in her cheeks; 
she had a gown of white wool stuff and a silver girdle of old Ger- 
man work that had a silver missal hung on it. 

“ You look like Nilsson’s Margueritel” said Jeanne de Sonnaz; 
“ only you are too lovely and too haughty for that, my dear. By 
the way, I have secured Faust. He will come to breakfast.” 

“ M. de Correze?” said Yere, with the color leaving her face. 
“Why— why — why did jmu ask him?” 

“ I asked him because it pleased me, because he is charming, 
because he serenaded us exquisitely; there are a hundred ‘ be- 
causes.’ You need not be alarmed, my love; Correze goes every- 
where. He is a gentleman though he is a singer. We always 
treat him so.” 

Yere said nothing; she was angered with herself that she had 
seemed to slight him , and she was uncertain how to reply aught. 

The sharp eyes of the Duches Jeanne watched her, and, as 
worldly-wise eyes are apt to do, saw very much that did not ex- 
ist to be seen. 

Yere stood mute, arranging her mountain-flowers. 

The servants announced Correze. 

Yere was not conscious of the trouble, the gladness, the vague 
apprehension, and as vague hope, that her face expressed, and 
which Jeanne de Sonnaz construed according to her own light, 
and Correze according to his. 

“What will that diablesse think?” he said angrily to himself 


MOTHS . 


*13 

u A hundred thousand things that are not, andv never will be, 
true I” 

For his own part, the world had taught him very well how to 
conceal his feelings when he chose, and in his caressing grace, 
that was much the same to all women, he had an impenetrable 
mask. But Vere had none. Vere was transparent as only a per- 
fectly innocent creature ever is; and the merciless eyes of Jeanne 
de Sonnaz were on them. 

“ You know the Princess Zouroff, I think?” said the latter, 
negligently. “ Was it Vera, or was it myself, that you serenaded 
so beautifully? An indiscreet question; but you know I am al- 
ways indiscreet.” 

“ Madame,” said Correze. whilst he bowed before Vere, and 
then turned to answer his tormentor, “ truth is always costly, but 
it is always best. At the risk of your displeasure, I must confess 
that I sang on no other sentiment than perfect exasperation with 
the chapelle du musique. That I serenaded yourself and Princess 
Zouroff was an accidental honor that I scarcely deserved to en- 
joy-” 

“What a pretty falsehood, and how nicely turned!” thought 
Madame de Sonnaz, as she pursued persistently, “ Then Vera was 
right: she said you did not know we were here. Nevertheless, 
you and she are old friends, I think, surely?” 

Correze had taken his seat between them; he was close to the 
duchess: there was a little distance between him and Vere, whose 
eyes were always on the flowers that employed her fingers. 

“I knew Madame la Princesse a little, very little, when she 
Was a child,” he said, with a smile. “Neither acquaintances 
nor court presentations before marriage count after it, I fear. 
Princess Vera at that time had a sailor hat and no^shoes: you see 
it is a very long time^ago.” 

Vere looked up a moment and smiled. Then the smile died 
away into a great sadness. It was long ago, indeed, so long that 
it seemed to her as though a whole lifetime severed her, the wife 
of Sergius Zouroff, from the happy child that had taken the rose 
from the hand of Correze. 

“No shoes! This is interesting. I suppose they were" dredg- 
ing, and she had lost herself. Tell me all about it,” said the 
high voice of Duchesse Jeanne; and Correze told her in his own 
airy graceful fashion, and made her laugh. 

“If I did not tell her something, God knows what she would 
conjecture,” he said to himself ; and when he sat down to the 
breakfast-table beside fthe open windows, and made himself 
charming in a gay and witty way that made the duchess think 
to herself, “ She is in love, but he is not.” 

Vere sat almost silent. She could not imitate his insouciance , 
liis gayety, his abandonment to the immediate hour, the skill 
with which he made apparent frankness serve as an entire con- 
cealment. 

She sat in a sort of trance, only hearing the rich sweet cadence 
of the voice whose mere laughter was music and whose mere 
murmur was a caress. 

The sunshine and the green water glancing through the spaces 


214 


MOTHS 


of the blinds, the pretty quaint figures moving up and down und'- 
the trees on the opposite bank, the scent of the mountain straw* 
berries and the Alpine flowers, the fragrance of the pine woods 
filling the air, the voice'of Correze, melodious even in its laughter, 
crossed by the clear, harsh, imperious tones of Jeanne de Sonnaz 
— all seemed to Vere like the scenes and sounds of a dream, all 
blent together into a sweet confusion of sunshine and shade, of 
silver speech and golden silence. 

She had longed to meet him; she had dreaded to meet him. 
Month after month her heart had yearned and her courage had 
quailed; his eyes had said so much, and his lips had said nothing. 
They had been strangers so long, and now, all in a moment, he 
was sitting at her table in famfliar intimacy, he who had sung 
the Priere of Sully-Prudhomme. 

Her eyes shone with unaccustomed light; her serious lips had 
a smile trembling on them; the coldness and the stillness which 
were not natural to her years gradually changed and melted, as 
the snow before tbe sunbeams of summer; yet she felt restless 
and apprehensive. She wondered what he thought of her; if he 
condemned her in haste, as one among the many bought by a 
brilliant and loveless marriage; if he believed that the moth had 
forgotten the star and dropped to mere earthly fire? She could 
not tell. 

Correze was not the Saint Raphael who had given her the rose; 
he was the Correze of Paris, witty, brilliant, careless, wordly- 
wise, bent on amusing and disarming the Duchesse de Sonnaz. 

Yere, who knew nothing of his motive, or of her peril, felt a 
chill of faint, intangible disappointment. She herself had no 
duality of nature; she had nothing of the flexible, changeful, 
many-sided temper of the artist; she was always Yere, whether 
she pleased or displeased, whether she were happy or unhappy; 
whether she were with king or peasant she was always what she 
had been born, always Yere Herbert, never Vera Zouroff, though 
church and law had called her so. 

“She is like a pearl,” thought Correze, watching her; “she 
has nothing of the opal or the diamond; she does not depend on 
light; she never changes or borrows color; she is like a pearl; 
nothing alters the pearl — till you throw it into the acid.” 

Meanwhile, as he thought so, he was making Jeanne de Son- 
naz shed tears of inextinguishable laughter at stories of his 
friends of the Comedie Francaise; for, in common with all 
great ladies, her appetite was insatiable for anecdotes of the 
women whom she would not have visited, yet whom she copied, 
studied, and, though she would not have confessed it, often 
envied. 

“ Le diable est entre,” thought the Duchesse Jeanne, ruffling 
the moss-rose amidst her lace, amused. 

“ Le diable n'entrera jamais ,” thought Correze, who guessed 
very nearly what she was thinking. 

Yere was almost always silent. Every now and then she found 
his soft, pensive eyes looking at her, and then she looked away 
and her face grew w arm. 

What did he .think of her? she was asking herself uneasily; 


MOTHS . 


215 


he, who had bidden her keep herself unspotted from the world; 
he, who had sent her the parable of the moth and the star; he, 
who filled her thoughts and absorbed her fife more absolutely 
than she had any idea of, had said nothing to her since the day 
he had bidden her farewell at Trouville. 

Correze kept up the conversation with the duchess in her own 
gay strain; and Yere listened, trying to detect in this amiably 
cynical man of the world the savior of Pere Martin, the artist of 
the lyric drama, the hero of all her innocent memories and 
dreams. He was more kindred to her ideal when he grew more 
in earnest, and spoke of himself and his own art, in answer to 
Jeanne de Sonnaz, who reproached him with apathy to the 
claims of Berlioz. 

“ No,” he said, with some warmth, “ I refuse to recognize the 
divinity of noise; I utterly deny the majesty of monster choruses; 
clamor and clangor are the death-knell of music, as drapery and 
so-called realism (which means, if it mean aught, that the dress 
is more real than the form underneath it) are the destruction of 
sculpture. It is very strange. Every day art in every other way 
becomes more natural and music more artificial. Every day I 
wake up expecting to hear myself denigre and denounced as old- 
fashioned because I sing as my nature as well as my training 
teaches me to do. It is very odd; there is such a cry for natural- 
ism in other arts; we have Millet instead of Claude; we have 
Zola instead of George Sand; we have Dumas fils instead of Cor- 
neille; we have Mercie instead of Canova; but in music we have 
precisely the reverse, and we have the elephantine creations, the 
elaborate and pompous combinations of Baireuth and the Tone 
school, instead of the old sweet strains of melody that went 
straight and clear to the ear and the heart of man. Sometimes 
my enemies write in their journals that I sing as if I were a 
Tuscan peasant strolling through his com; how proud they make 
me! But they do not mean to do so. I will not twist and empha- 
size. I trust to melody. I was taught music in its own country, 
and I will not sin against the canons of the Italians. They are 
right. Rhetoric is one thing, and song is another. Why confuse 
the two? Simplicity is the soul of great music, as it is the mark 
of great passions. Ornament is out of place in melody which 
represents single emotions at their height, be they joy, or fear, or 
hate, or love, or shame, or vengeance, or whatsoever they will. 
Music is not a science any more than poetry is. It is a sublime 
instinct, like genius of all kinds. I sing as naturally as other 
men speak; let me remain natural ”, 

“ But you are too strong for it to matter what they say!” 

Correze shrugged his shoulders. 

“ I am indifferent. Indifference is always strength. Just now 
T do as I like, to be sure, and yet I have the world with me! But 
that is only because I am the fashion. There is so much more 
of fashion than of fame in our generation. Fame was a grand 
thing, serious and solemn; the people gave it — such people as 
ran before Correggio’s Madonna as before a heaven- descended 
thing, and made Catherine of Siena a living possibility in their 
midst. It was a grand guerdon, given in grand times. It is too 


$16 


corns'. 


serious and too stern for us; we have only fashion — a light thing 
that you crown one day and depose the next, a marsh-light 
born of bad gases that dances up to one one moment and dances 
away the next. Well, we have what we are worth, so much is 
certain.” 

“ Do you think we always have the fate we merit?” said Vere, 
in a low tone. 

Correze looked up, and she thought his soft eyes grew stem. 

“I have usually thought so, princess — yes.” 

“ It is a cruel doctrine.” 

“ And a false one? Well — perhaps. So many side-winds blow; 
so many diseases are in the air; so many wandering insects, here 
to-day and gone to-morrow, sting the plant and canker it: that is 
what you mean? To be sure. When the aphis eats the rose it is 
no fault of the rose.” 

“ Zouroff is the aphis, I suppose,” thought Jeanne deSonnaz as 
she looked at Vere. “ Do not speak in parables, Correze. It is 
detestable. A metaphor always halts somewhere, like an Amer- 
ican paper I read last week, which said, * Memphis is sitting in 
the ashes of woe and desolation, and our stock of groceries is run- 
ning low!’ So Vere complains of fate and you of fame! — what 
ingratitude!” 

“Fame, duchess!” cried Correze. “Pray do not use such a 
gros mot to me. Michael Angelo, has fame, and Cromwell, and 
Monsieur Edison, but a singer! — we are the most ephemeral of all 
ephmeridae. We are at best only a sound — just a sound! When 
we have passed away into ‘ the immemorable silences’ there is 
nothing left of us, no more than of the wind that blew through 
Cory don’s pipe.” 

“ Monsieur Edison will tell you that Corydon’s pipe will be 
heard a thousand years hence through the skill of science.” 

“What horror!” said Correze. “I think I never should have 
courage to sing another note if I believed that I should echo 
through all the ages in that way.” 

“ And yet you say that you want fame.” 

“ I think I never said that, madame. I said that fame is not a 
pft of our times; and, if it were, a singer would have no title to 


“ You have something very like it, at all events. When half a 
city drags your carriage like a chariot of victory ” 

“ Caprice, madame; pure caprice,” said Correze. “ I have hap- 
pened for the moment to please them.” 

“ And what do Csesars, and Napoleons, and others rulers do? — 
happen for the moment to frighten them. Yours is the prettier 
part to play.” 

“ A sugar-stick is prettier than a ramrod, but ” 

“You do not deserve the Kaiserinn’s strawberries,” said 
Jeanne de Sonnaz, tumbling the big berries nevertheless on to 
his plate. 

“ I never deserved anything, but I have had much,” said Cor- 
reze. “ Even Madame de Sonnaz, while she scolds, smiles on 
me — like Fortune.” 


MOTHS. 217 

“Madame Vere neither smiles nor scolds,” said the duchess. 
“Perhaps she thinks Fortune and I have spoiled you.” 

“Perhaps she thinks me beneath both favor and scorn.” 

Vere broke biscuits for Loris, and seemed not have heard. She 
felt herself color; for, though she was a great lady, she was 
still very young. She could not follow his careless, easy banter, 
and its airy negligence hurt her. If he had sent her the 
jeweled metaphor of the moth and the star, how could he be 
altogether indifferent to her fate? She had felt that the song 
of Heine had been sung for her; yet now she began to doubt 
whether the meaning that she had given to it had not been her 
own delusion; whether the eloquence he had thrown into the 
German words had not been the mere counterfeit emotion of 
an artist, the emotion of his Gennaro, of his Edgardo, of his 
Romeo. It is the doubt with which every artist is wronged by 
those for whom he feels the most. Vere, as she doubted, felt 
wounded and disillusioned. 

Breakfast ended, the duchess made him sit out on the balcony 
under the awning; she made him smoke her cigarettes; she 
made him tell her more anecdotes of that artist life which she 
was convinced must be one long holiday, one untiring carnival. 
Correze obeyed, and kept her amused. Vere sat within the 
window making lace, never caring to have her fingers quite idle. 

Her heart had sunk; the shining river and the bright sun- 
shine had grown dull; the old heavy burden of hopelessness and 
apathy had fallen on her again. She did not find her Saint 
Raphael, and she listened with pain as his laugh mingled with 
the shrill gay tones of the duchess. Every one seemed able to 
be happy, or at least light-hearted, except herself; it must be 
some fault in her, she thought. 

Correze, even as his eyes seemed to glance out to the green 
river or to fasten 'admiringly on the fouillis and moss-roses of 
his companion, in reality never ceased to see that figure which 
sat so still inside the window, with its white gown, its silver 
girdle, its proud bent head, its slender hands weaving the 
thread lace. 

“My pearl, that they set in a hog’s drinking- trough!” he 
thought, bitterly. “Alas, no! not mine! never mine! If only she 
were at peace it would not matter; but she is not; she never 
will be; they cannot kill her soul in her, though they try hard.’’ 

“But do they ever really pay Felix for their dresses?” the 
duchess was crying. “Or do they not think, like Sheridan, 
that to pay any debt is a waste of good money?” 

At that moment some Austrians of the court were announced 
— handsome young chamberlains and aides-de-camp, who came 
to pay their homage to the Princess Zouroff and her friend. 

After a little while the duchess monopolized them as she had 
a ta'lent for monopolizing most things and most people; and Oor- 
reze, as he took his leave, found himself for one moment alone 
before Vere’s chair. 

The duchess and the Austrians were all out on the balcony, 
laughing rather noisily, and planning riding-parties, dining- 
parties, hunting, boating, and all other means of diversion that 
the simplicity of Ischl afforded. 


218 


MOTHS, 


Correze hesitated a moment, then touched the lace-work or 
her cushion. 

“Work for fairies, princess,” he said, as his fingers caressed 
the cobweb of thread. 

“Very useless, I am afraid — as useless as the poor fairies are 
nowadays,” she answered, without looking up from it. 

“Useless? Surely not? Is not lace one of the industries of 
the world?” 

“Not as I make it, I think. It is better than sitting with idle 
hands, that is all. When I have made a few metres, then I give 
them to any poor girl I meet; she could make better herself, 
but she is generally good-natured enough to be pleased ” 

Her voice trembled a little as she spoke. The artist had made 
so much of her mental and spiritual life all through the past 
months that it almost hurt her to have the man before her; to 
her he was the lover, the poet, the king, the soldier, the prophet, 
the cavalier of the ideal worlds in which he had become famil- 
iar to her. It was an effort to speak tranquilly and indiffer- 
ently to him as to any other drawing-room idler. 

“It would not require much good nature to be grateful for 
anything you gave,” said Correze, with a smile. “I am rather 
learned in lace. I knew old women in Venice who even showed 
me the old forgotten point italien. May I show it to you? It 
is almost a lost art.” 

His fingers, slender and agile, like the fingers of all artists, 
took up the threads and moved them in and out with skill. 

“It is not man’s work,” he said, with a little low laugh; “but 
then, you know, I am an artist.” 

“You say that as Coucy used to say *Je sius ni rot ni prince .’ ” 

“Perhaps. No doubt les rois et les princes laughed at Coucy.” 

“I do not think they did. Coucy’s pride always seemed to me 
so far above laughter.” 

“You do not look at my point italien, madame,” said Correze. 

Instead of looking down at his fingers with the threads on 
them, she looked up and met his eyes. The blood flew into her 
fair face; she felt confused and bewildered; the frankness of her 
nature moved her lips. 

“I have wanted to tell you always,” she said, hurriedly — “to 
thank you— you sent me that necklace of the moth and the 
star?” 

Correze bowed his head over the lace. 

“You forgive my temerity?” he murmured. 

“What was there to forgive? It was beautiful, and— 'and— I 
understood. But it was not my fault that I sank.” 

Then she stopped suddenly; she remembered how much her 
words implied; she remembered all that they admitted of her 
marriage. 

Correze gazed on her in silence. It had been a mystery to him 
always, a mystery of perplexity and pain, that the innocent, 
resolute, proud nature which (he had discerned in Vere Herbert 
should have bent so easily and so rapidly under the teaching 
of her mother to the tempting of the world. Again and 
again he had said to himself that that child had surely had a 


MOTHS. 


219 


martyr's spirit and a heroine’s courage in her, yet had she suc- 
cumbed to the first hour of pressure, the first whisper of ambi- 
tion, like the weakest and vainest creature ever born of woman. 
He had never understood, despite all his knowledge of Lady 
Dorothy, the sudden and unresisted sacrifice of her daughter. 
Her words now startled and bewildered him, and showed hiim a 
deeper deep than any of which he had dreamed. 

More versed in the world’s suspicions than she, he saw the 
keen glittering eyes of the Duchesse Jeanne studying them, from 
the balcony, as she laughed and chattered with her chamber- 
lains and soldiers. He released the threads of the lace, and re- 
placed the pillow and bowed very low. 

“You do me too much honor, princess,” he murmured, too 
gently for them to reach the keen ears of the brilliant spy of 
the balcony. “To accept my allegory was condescension; to in- 
terpret it was sympathy; to forgive it is miercy. For all three I 
thank you. Allow me ” 

He bowed over her hand, which he scarcely touched, bowed 
again to Madame de Sonnaz, and then left the chamber. 

Vere took up her lace-work, and began afresh to entangle 
the threads. 

Her heart was heavy. 

She thought that he condemned her; he seemed to her cold 
and changed. 

“How that stupid lace absorbs you, Vere!” cried Jeanne de 
Sonnaz. “The Empress has sent to us to ride with her at four, 
and there is a little sauterie in the evening up there. You can- 
not refuse.” 


CHAPTER XX. 

The next morning Correze, breakfasting at noon in the bay- 
window of the bright Speisesaal that looks on the three- 
cornered Platz and the trees on the esplanade, said to himself, 
“I ought to go.” 

But he did not resolve to go. 

The night before he had also been summoned to the Schloss. 
He was famous for his captiousness to sovereigns, but he had 
been to this summons obedient, and had been welcomed by all, 
from their majesties to the big dog; and had taken his guitar, 
and sung, as he sang to please himself, and had been in his most 
brilliant and his most bewitching mood. In truth their majes- 
ties, charming and gracious and sympathetic though they were, 
had been of little account to him; what he had thought about, 
what he had sung to, was a tall slender form clothed in white, 
with water-lilies about her waist and throat, as though she were 
Undine. He approached her little; he looked at her always. The 
knowledge that she was there gave him inspiration; when he 
sang he surpassed himself; when he went away and strolled on 
foot down through the pine glades into the little town, he sang 
half aloud still; and an old forester, going to his work in gray- 
dawn, told his wiife that he had (heard a Hix, with a voice like 
a nightingale, down in the heart of the woods. 


m 


MOTHS. 


He remained always a mountaineer at heart. The gray stilb 
ness and mist of the daybreak, the familiar smell of the pine 
boughs, the innocent forest creatures that ran or flew before his 
feet, the gleam of snow on the peaks in the distance, the very 
moss at his feet bright with dew, all were delightful to him and 
brought his boyhood back to him. 

Yet his heart was heavy because he had seen the woman he 
could have loved; indeed, he could no longer deny to himself 
that he did love her, and yet knew very well that she was as 
utterly lost to him as though she had been a wraith of the 
mountain snow that would vanish at touch of the sunrise. 

AH things were well with him, and Fortune spoiled him, as 
he had said. 

As he sat at breakfast in the wide sunny window, and opened 
his 4 Figaro,” he read of the affection of Paris for him, the regret 
of a world which has, like a beautiful woman, so many to teach 
it forgetfulness, that any remembrance in absence is unusual 
homage. A courtier brought him from the court a silver casket 
of old niello work inlaid with precious stones, and having a 
miniature of Penicaud in the lid, and, what he cared for more, a 
bidding from the Kaiser to hunt chamois among the ice-peaks 
of the Dachstein at daybreak on the morrow. The post arriving 
brought him little scented letters which told him, in language 
more or less, welcome, that the universal regret of the many 
was shared in deeper and tenderer sentiment by the few; and 
some of these could not fail to charm his vanity, if they 
failed to touch his heart. Yet he had not much vanity, and 
he was used to all these favors of peoples, of sovereigns, of 
beauties. They rained on him as rose-leaves rain on grass in 
midsummer; and it was the height of summer with him, and 
none of his rose-leaves w-re faded. Still * 

“I ought to go,” he thought, and that thought absorbed him. 
He discerned the influence his presence had on Yere. He knew 
too well his power on women to mistake its exercise. He saw 
what she had not seen herself; he had long endeavored to avoid 
her; he had often feared for them both, the moment when the 
accidents of society should bring them in contact. No vanity 
and no selfishness moved him; but an infinite compassion stirred 
in him, and an infinite sorrow. ^ 

“If I let myself love her, my life will be ruined. She will 
never be as others have been. There will be nothing between us 
ever except an immense regret.” So he thought as he sat look- 
ing out on the sunshine that played on the silver and gold of the 
Emperor’s casket. & 

At that moment they brought him from Madame de Sonnaz a 
note bidding him to dine with her that night. Correze penned 
re Py graceful excuse, pleading that he was to set out for 
the Dachstem at nightfall. “Who shall say that we need 
Nihilism, he wrote, in conclusion, “ when a public singer scales 
xce-peaks with a Kaiser.” 

His answer dispatched, he lit another cigar, and watched the 
Traun water gleam under the old gray arches of the bridge. 


MOTHS. 


831 

,e So she thinks 1 shall help her to her vengeance on Sergius 
Zouroff,” he thought. *'Vous etes mal torribee, duchesseP 

August noontide is cool enough in the duchy of Salzburg; he 
did not feel in the mood for the chatter of the casino and the 
humors of the Trinkhalle, for the pretty women in their swing- 
ing chairs and whist and ecarte in the river-balconies; there were 
half a hundred people here who in another half-hour would seize 
on him beyond escape, as they trooped back from their morning 
exercise and baths. He bethought himself of an offer of horses 
made him by a grand duke staying there, sent a line to the 
duke’s equerry, and, before his acquaintances had returned from 
the Trinkhalle, was riding slowly out on a handsome Hungarian 
mare, taking his road by chance, as he paced out of the little 
town, following the ways of the Traun as it flowed along to- 
wards Styria, with the wood-clothed hills rising to right and 
left. 

There is a noble road that runs through the Weissbach Thai to 
the lake of Attersee. It is sixteen miles or more of forest road- 
way. The wood are grand, the trees are giants, moss-growr 
with age, ~nd set m a wilderness of ferns and flowers; the Weiss- 
bach ru°hes through them white with perpetual foam; the great 
hills are half light, half gloom beyond the branches, and there is 
the gray of glaciers, the aerial blue of crevasses, forever shining 
behind the forest foliage, where the clouds lie on the mountains, 
where summer lightnings flash, and summer rains drift like 
mist. Che place is full of birds and all wild woodland creatures; 
there js scarcely a habitation from one end of the road to the 
other. Where any wood has been cleared, there are tracts ef 
lilac heather and of broom; here and there is a cross, telling of 
some sudden death from flood, or frost, or woodman's misad- 
venture; under the broad drooping branches of Siberian pines, 
countless little streams rise and bubble through the grasses; and 
at the end of it all there is the blue bright lake, blue as a mouse- 
oar, bright as a child’s eyes — the largest lake in all Austria. 

War-worn Europe has little left that is more beautiful than 
that grand, tranquil, solitary forest-ride, with that azure water 
for its goal and crown. 

The Attersee is very lovely, t>lue as the Mediterranean, radi- 
antly, wonderfully blue, sweeping away into the distance to the 
Schaffberg range, with white-sailed boats upon it, and here and 
there, alasl the trail of a steamer as the vessels go to and from 
Unterach and Steinbach and Nussdorf. 

At Weissbach the meadows go close down to the 'water, 
meadows of that rich, long, flower-filled grass that is the glory 
of Austria and grows all about the little white stone quays; the 
boats come up to the edge of the meadows, and the rowers, or 
those who sail in them, land in that knee- deep grass, under the 
shade of beech- trees. There is a little summer inn on the shore, 
with balconies and hanging creepers; it is modest and does 
not greatly hurt the scene; the hills rise sheer and bold above 
it. A little higher yet are the mountains of the Hochlaken and 
Hoellen ranges, where you can shoot, if you will, the golden 
©agle and the vulture. 


223 


MOTHS. 


Correze, beguiled by the beauty of the road, followed 
leisurely, till it led him to the Attersee in some two hours’ time. 
There he dismounted and strolled about. It was not very often 
that he had leisure for long quiet hours in the open air, but he 
always enjoyed them; he felt angry with himself that in this 
pure atmosphere, in this serene loveliness, he remained dissatis- 
fied and ill at ease — because he was alone. 

Do what he would, he could not forget the grand, troubled eyes 
of Yere, and the accent of her voice, when she had said, “ It was 
not my fault that I sank!” 

“ Nothing could ever be her fault,” he thought; “yet what 
could they do to her so quickly? what force could her mother 
use?” 

He left the mare in the inn-stable for rest, and wandered up 
into tlie.higlier slopes of the hills, leaving the lake with its boats 
that came and went, its meadows dotted with human butterflies, 
its little landing-place with flags flying. “The forest road is 
grander,” he said, and told the groom to lead the horse back after 
him when it was rested; he meant to return to Ischl on foot. 
Fifteen miles of woodland on a summer afternoon is more charm- 
ing cut of saddle than in it. 

“With a horse one must go so terribly straight,” he thought 
to himself; “it is the by-paths that are the charm of the forest, 
the turning to left or to right at one’s whim, the resting by the 
way, the losing oneself even, and the chance of passing the 
night under the stars; the pleasure of being young again at 
our old ecole buissonniere. All that is inevitably lost when one 
rides.” 

So he turned his bade on the blue Attersee, and walked back 
along the dale, that seemed a path of green and gold as the sun- 
beams of afternoon shone through the trees. 

There is a part that is mere moorland, where the pines have 
been felled and the heather grows alone: the sandy road-track 
runs between the lilac plumes, lying open to the light for a little 
while before it plunges again into the deep sweet shadows of the 
forest growth. On the crest of that more open part he saw two 
human figures and a dog; they were dark and colorless against 
the bright afternoon light, yet in anPinstant he recognized them: 
they were the figures of Vere and of a Russian servant. 

In a few moments he could overtake them, for they moved 
slowiy. He hesitated— -doubted — said to himself that he would 
do best to turn back again whilst he was still unseen. At that 
moment Yere paused, looked behind her to see the sun going to- 
wards its setting above the mountains, and saw also himself. 

He hesitated no more, but approached her. 

He saw that delicate color, that was like the hue of the wild 
rose he had once given her, come into her face; but she gave him 
her hand simply and cordially, and he bowed over it with hia 
bead uncovered. 

“You have been to the lake, princess? So have I; bat the 
forest is better. The Attersee has too many people by it, and I 
Maw a funnel in the distance: all illusion was destroyed.” 

The steamers make the tour of it, unhappily. But this forest 


MOTES. 223 

road is perfect. I send my ponies on to wait for me by the 
Chorynsky clause. And you?” 

“I have left my horse, or rather Duke Ludwig’s horse, to fol* 
low me. She is a young mare, and needs one’s attention, which 
spoils the pleasures of the wood. What a grand country it is! 
If it did not rain so often it would be Arcadia. Are you strong 
enough to walk so far, miadame?” 

The “madame” hurt him to say, and hurt her to hear. She 
answered a little hurriedly, that she liked walking — it never 
hurt her — in Paris she could walk so little, that tired her far 
more. And Correze, unasked but unrepulsed, strolled on beside 
her, the grim white-bearded mujik behind them. 

She was dressed with perfect simplicity in something cream- 
hued and soft, but he thought that she looked lovelier than she 
had done even in her jewels and her nenuphars at night. 

“0 gioventu primavera della vita!” he thought. “Even a tyrant 
like 'the Muscovite cannot altogether spoil its glories.” 

They had come now into the fragrant gloom of the forest, 
where the trees stood thick as bowmen in a fight in olden days, 
and the mountains rose behind them stern and blue like tem- 
pest-clouds, while the silence was full of the fresh sound of 
rushing waters. 

Loris was darting hither and thither, chasing hares, scenting 
foxes, starting birds of all species, but never going very far 
afield from his mistress. 

They walked on almost in silence; the woodland (had that 
beauty amidst which idle speech seems a sort of profanation; 
and Correze was musing: 

“Shall I tell her the truth, and frighten her and disgust her, 
and never see her face again, except across the gas-glare of the 
Grand Opera? Or shall I keep 'silence, and try to deserve her 
trust, and try and be some shield between her and the world 
they have cast her into, and become in time, perhaps, of some aid 
and service to her? One way is selfish and easy; the other ” 

He knew himself, and knew women, too well to be blind to 
any of the dangers that would befall both in the latter course; 
but an infinite compassion was in him for this young and beau- 
tiful woman; a deep tenderness was in him for her— mournful 
and wistful— quelling passion. He forever reproached himself 
that he had not followed his impulse, and cast prudence to the 
winds, and stayed by the gray northern sea and saved her, whilst 
yet there (had been time, from the world and from her mother. 

They paced onward side by side. 

The old man-servant followed with a frown on his brows. He 
knew Correze by sight, he had seen all St. Petersburg wild with 
adoration of their idol, running before his sledge, and strewing 
flowers and evergreens on the frozen earth in his honor; but he 
did not think it fitting for a mere foreign singer to walk side by 
side with the Princess Zouroff. Nevertheless he kept respect- 
fully his due distance behind them, marveling, only whether it 
would lie within his duty to tell his master of this strange sum- 
mer’s day stroll. 


224 


MOTHS. 


“Madame de Sonnaz is not with you to-day?” Correze was 
saying, as he roused himself from his meditation.. 

Vere answered him, “No. She has many other friends in 
Ischl; she is with the Archduchess Sophie.” 

“Ah! You like Madame de Sonnaz? Of course you de, since 
you travel together.” 

“She offered to come with me. M. Zouroff accepted for :ue. 
It was very kind of her.” 

“Bah! And that is the way they trick you and you never 
dream of their shame?” thought Correze as he merely said 
aloud, “The Duchess is very witty, very charming. She must be 
an amusing companion — when she is in a good humor!” 

“You do not like her? You seemed as if you did yester. 
day.” 

It was a little reproach that unconsciously escaped her. His 
gallantries and his persiflage at the breakfast had hurt her too 
much for her to forget them so soon. 

“I like her as I like all her world,” said Correze. “I like her 
with my intelligence infinitely; with my heart, or what does 
duty for it, I abhor her.” 

“You separate intelligence and feeling, then?” 

“By five thousand leagues! Will M. Zouroff join you here?” 

“He will meet us at Vienna; Madame de Sonnaz is going to 
stay with me at the Svir.” 

“You will be long in Russia?” 

“Oh, no; the two next months, perhaps.” 

“But so much long travel — does it not tire you, since you are 
not strong?” 

“I think I am strong enough. It is not that; I am tired — but 
it is of being useless.” 

She would have said joyless and friendless, too, but she knew 
it was not well for any lamentation to escape her, which could 
seem to cast blame upon her husband, or ask pity for herself. 

“I am as useless as the lace I make,” she said, more lightly, 
to take weight off her words. “There is so much routine in 
the life we lead; I cannot escape from it. The days are all swal- 
lowed up by small things. When I was a child, and read of the 
old etiquette of Versailles, or the grand convert, and the petit 
convert, and the tres-petit convert, and all the rest of the 
formal divisions of the hours, I used to think how terrible it 
must have been to be the king; but our lives are much the 
same, they are divided between petits converts and grand converts, 
and there is no other time left.” 

“Yes, our great world is much like their great world — only 
with the dignity left out!” said Correze, as he thought — 

“No head but some world genius should rest 
Above the treasures of that perfect breast. 
***** Yet thou art bound— 

Oh, waste of nature! — to a shameless hound, 

To shameless lust! * * * Athene to> a Satyr.” 

“And how did they make her take the Satyr?” he mused. 
“She is not a reed to be blown by any wind, nor yet clay to be 
molded by any hand. What force did Miladi Dolly use?” 


MOTHS ' 


225 


"It is very difficult to be of much use,” Vere said, once more, 
as she walked on; “they say one does more hiarm than good by 
charity, and what else is there?” 

“You own peasantry? In those Russian villages there must 
be so much ignorance, so much superstition, so little compre- 
hension of the value of freedom or morality—” 

“My husband does not like to interfere with 'the peasantry; 
and, besides, I am so rarely in that country. The little I can do, 
I do in Paris. Ah!” She interrupted herself with a sudden 
remembrance, and a smile beamed over her face, as she turned 
it to Correze. “I know Pere Martin and his daughter; how they 
love you! They told m'e everything. What simple good crea- 
tures they are!” 

Correze smiled, too. 

“They are like the public; they over-estimate me sadly, and 
their enthusiasm dowers me with excellencies that I never pos- 
sessed. Horw came you to find, that father and daughter out, 
princess? I thought they lived like dormice.” 

She told him the little tale; and it drew them together, and 
made them more at ease one with another by its community of 
. interest, as they moved slowly down the woodland road through 
the leafy dusky shadows. For in the heart of each there was a 
dread that made them nervous. She thought always, “If only 
he will spare me my husband's name.” And he thought, “If 
only she would never speak to me of her husband!” 

Memories were between them 'that held them together, as the 
thought of little dead children will sometimes hold those who 
have loved and parted forever. 

He longed to know what force, or what temptation', had 
brought her to this base and joyless marriage; but his lips 
were shut. He had saved her from the insult of Noisette, but he 
thought she did not know it; he iwent yearly to hear the lark 
sing on the head of the cliff where he had gathered her rose, 
but he thought she knew nothing of that either. Yet the sense 
of these things was between them; and he dared not look at her 
as he went on down the mountain-road. 

She was thinking always of his bidding to her, when she had 
been a child, to keep unspotted from the world. She longed to 
tell him that she had not stooped to the guilt of base vanities 
when she had given herself to Sergius Zouroff; but her lips 
were shut. 

“I must not blame my mother, nor my husband,” she thought. 
Her cheeks burned as she felt, since he had saved her from the 
outrage of the K<ermesise, that be must know the daily insults 
of her life. She was troubled, confused, oppressed; yet the 
charm of his presence held her like an incantation. She went 
slowly through the grand old wood, as Spenser’s heroines 
through enchanted forests. 

“You said that you like Madame de Sonnaz?” he asked again, 
abruptly. 

“She is very agreeable,” she said, hesitatingly; “and she is 
very good-natured to me; she reminds me of many things that I 


228 


MOTHS. 


displease Prince Zouroff in— mere trifles of ceremonies and ob 
gervances that I forget, for I am very forgetful, you know.” 

“ Of little things, perhaps; thoughtful people often are. Big 
brains do not easily hold trifles. SoMadame de Sonnaz plays thcx 
part of Mentor to you about these little packets of starch that 
the beau monde thinks are the staff of life? That is kind of her, 
for I think no one ever more completely managed to throw the 
starch ,ever their left shoulder than she has donel” 

“ You do not like her?” 

“ Oh, one always likes great ladies and pretty woman. Not 
that she is pretty, but she has du charme, which is perhaps more. 
All I intended to say was, that she is not invariably sincere, and 
it might be as well that you should remember that if she be in- 
timate enough with you to give you counsels 

“ My husband told me to always listen to and follow what she 
said. He has, I believe, a great esteem for her.” 

Correze swore an oath, that only a foxglove heard, as ho 
stooped to gather it. There wa3 a great disgust on his mobile 
face, that she did not see, as he was bending down among the 
blossoms. 

“ No doubt,” he said, briefly; “ esteem is not exactly what the 
Duchesse Jeanne has inspired or sought to inspire; but M. Zouroff 
possibly knows her better than I can do ” 

“ But is she not a good woman?” Vere asked, with a little 
Sternness coming on her delicate face. 

Correze laughed a little; yet there was a great compassion in 
his eyes as he glanced at her. 

“ Good? Madame Jeanne? 1 am afraid she would laugh very 
much if she heard you. Yes, she is very good for five minutes 
after she has left the confessional — for she does go to confess, 
though I cannot imagine her telling truth there. It would bo 
trop bourgeoises 

“ You speak as if she were indeed not good!” 

“ Good? bad? If there were only good and bad in this world it 
would not matter so much,” said Correze, a little recklessly and 
at random. “cLife would not be such a disheartening affair as 
it is. Unfortunately the majority of people are neither one nor 
the other, and have little inclination for either crime or virtue. 
It would be almost as absurd to condemn them as to admire 
them. They are like tracts of shifting sand, in which nothing 
good or bad can take root. To me they are more despairing to 
contemplate than the darkest depth of evil: out of that may como 
such hope as comes of redemption and remorse, but in the vast* 
frivolous, featureless mass of society there is no hope. It is like 
a feather bed, in which the finest steel must lose point and power. w 

‘*But is the Duchesse de Sonnaz characterless? Frivolous, 
perhaps, but surely not characterless?” said Vere, with that ad- 
herence to the simple point of argument and rejection of all dis- 
cursiveness which had once made her the despair of her mother. 

“See for yourself, princess,” said Correze, suggestively. 
“ What she has, or has not, of character may well become your 
gtudy. When we are intimate with any person it is very needful 
to know them well; what one’s mere acquaintances are matter* 


MOTHS. 


2 ^ 


little, one can no more count them than count the gnats on a 
summer day; but about our friends we cannot be too careful.” 

“ She is not my friend; I have not any friend.” 

.There was a loneliness and a melancholy in the simplicity of 
tfhe words that was in pathetic contrast with that position which 
so many other women envied her. 

Tender words, that once said could never have been withdrawn, 
and would have divided him from her forever, rose to the lips of 
Correze, but he did not utter them; he answered her with equal- 
ly simple seriousness: 

“ I can believe that you have not. You would find them, per- 
haps, in a world you are not allowed to know anything of — a 
World of narrow means but of wide thoughts and high ideals. In 
our world — I may say ours, for if you are one of its great ladies 
I am one of its pets and playthings, and so may claim a place in 
it — there is very little thought, and there is certainly no kind of 
ideal beyond winning the Grand Prix for one sex and being better 
dressed than everybody for the other. It is scarcely possible 
that you should find much sympathy in it; and without sym- 
pathy there is no friendship. There are noble people in it still 
here and there, it is true, but the pity of modern life in society is 
that all its habits, its excitements, and its high pressure make as 
effectual a disguise morally as our domino in Carnival ball does 
physically. Everybody looks just like everybody else. Perhaps, 
as under the domino, so under the appearance, there may be 
great nobility as great deformity; but all look alike. Were Soc- 
rates among us, he would only look like a club-bore; and were 
there Messalina, she would only look — well — look much like our 
Duchesse Jeanne.” 

Vere glanced at him quickly, then reddened slightly. 

“What a baseness I am committing to speak ill of a woman 
who gave me her smiles and her strawberries 1” thought Correze. 
“Nevertheless, warned against Madame Jeanne she must be, 
even if she think me ever so treacherous to give the warning. 
She knows nothing; it would be as well she should know noth- 
ing; only, if she be not on her guard, Jeanne will hurt her— 
some way. The mistress of Zouroff will never forgive his wife, 
and Casse-une-Croute would pardon her more readily than would 
the wife of Due Paul. Oh, God I what a world to throw her 
into! The white doe of Rylstone cast into a vivisector’s torture- 
trough!” 

And what could he say to her of it all? Nothing. 

Midway in this dale of Weissbach there is a memorial cross 
with a rude painting; the trees are majestic and gigantic there; 
there is a wooden bench; and a little way down, under the trees, 
there is the river, broken -up by rocks and stones into eddies and 
freshets of white foam. 

“Rest here, princess,” said Correze. “ You have walked sev- 
eral miles by this, and that stick parasol of yours is no alpenstock 
to help you much. Look at those hills through the trees: one 
sees here, if nowhere else, what the poets’ ‘blue air’ means. 
Soon the sun will set, and the sapphire blue will be cold gray* 


m 


MOTHS. 


But rest a few moments, and I will gather you some of that yet 
low gentian. You keep your old love of flowers, I am sure?” 

Vere smiled a little sadly. 

“ Indeed, yes; but it is with flowers as with everything else, I 
think, in the world: one cannot enjoy them for the profusion 
and the waste of them everywhere. "When one thinks of the 
millions that die at one ball ! — and no one hardly looks at them. 
The most you hear any one say is, ‘ The rooms look very well to- 
night'.’ And the flowers die for that.” 

“That comes of the pretentious prodigality we call civiliza- 
tion,” said Correze. “ More prosaically, it is just the same with 
food: at every grand dinner enough food is wasted to feed a 
whole street, and the number of dishes is so exaggerated that 
half of them go away untasted, and even the other half is too 
much for any mortal appetite. I do not know why we do it; no 
one enjoys it; Lazarus out of the alley might, perhaps, by way of 
change, but then he is never Invited.” 

“ Everything in our life is so exaggerated,” said Vere, with a 
sigh of fatigue, as she recalled the endless weariness of the state 
banquets, the court balls, the perpetual succession of entertain- 
ments, which in her world represented pleasure. “There is 
nothing but exaggeration everywhere; to me it always seems 
vulgarity. Our dress is overloaded like our dinners, our days 
are over-filled like our houses. Who is to blame ? The leaders 
of society, I suppose.” 

“ Ladies like Madame Jeanne,” said Correze, quickly. 

She smiled a little. 

“ You are very angry with her?’ 

“ Princess, frankly, I do not think she is a fit companion for 
you.” 

“ My husband thinks that she is so.” 

“ Then there is no more to be said, no doubt,” said Correze, 
with his teeth shut. “ For me to correct the judgment of M. 
Zouroff would be too great presumption.” 

“ You may be quite right,” said Vere. “ But you see, it is not 
for me to question; I have only to obey.” 

Correze choked an oath into silence, and wandered a little way 
toward the water to gather another foxglove. 

Vere sat on the low bench under the crucifix on the great tree; 
she had taken off her hat; she had the flowers in her lap; her dr ;-' s 
was white; she had no ornament of any sort; she looked very 
like the child who had sat with him by the sweet-brier hedge on 
Calvados. Taller, lovelier, with a different expression on her 
grave, proud face, and all the questioning eagerness gone forever 
from her eyes; yet, for the moment, very like — so like that, but 
for the gleam of the diamond circle that was her marriage-ring, 
he would have forgotten. 

He came and leaned against one of the great trees, and watched 
the shadows of the leaves flutter on her white skirts. He real- 
ized that he loved her more than he had ever loved anything on 
earth, and that she was the wife if Sergius Zouroff. She was no 
more Vere, but the Princess Vera, and her world thought her so 
cold that it had called her the edelweiss. 


MOTHS. 


229 


He forced himself to speak of idle things. 

“After all,” he said, aloud, “when all is said and done, I do 
believe the artistic life to be the happiest the earth holds. To 
be sure, there is a general feeling still that we do not deserve 
Christian burial; but that need not much trouble a living man. 

I think, despite all the shadows that envy and obtuseness, and 
the malevolence of the unsuccessful rival, and the absurdities 
of the incapable critic, cast upon its path, the artistic life is 
the finest, the truest, the most Greek, and so the really hap- 
piest. Artists see and hear and feel more than other people — 
when they are artists really, and not mere manufacturers, as 
too many are or become. My own art has a little too much 
smell of the footlights; I have too few hours alone with Bee- 
thoven and Mozart, and too many with the gas-lit crowds be- 
fore me. Yet it has many beautiful things in it; it is always 
picturesque, never mediocre. Think of my life beside a bank- 
er’s in his parlor, beside a lawyer’s in the courts ; they are like 
spiders, shut up in their own dust. I am like a swallow, who 
always sees the sun, because he goes where it is summer.” 

“It is always summer with you.” There was a tinge of regret 
and of wistfulness in her voice of which she was not conscious. 

“It will be winter henceforward,” he thought, as he an- 
swered. “Yes, it has been so. I have been singularly fortunate 
— perhaps as much in the temperament I was born with as in 
other things; for, if we escape any very great calamity, it is 
our own nature that makes it summer or makes it winter 
with us.” 

“But if you were in Sibera,” said Vere, with a faint smile, 
“could you make it summer there?” 

“I would try,” said Correze. “I suppose Nature would look 
grand there sometimes, and there would be one’s fellow-crea- 
tures. But then, you know, it has been my good fortune al- 
ways to be in the sun; I am no judge of darkness. I dread it. 
Sometimes I wake in the night and think if I lost my voice all 
suddenly, as I may any day, how should I bear it? — to be liv- 
ing and only a memory to the public, as if I were dead — 
scarcely a memory even; there is no written record of song, 
and its mere echo soon goes off the ear. How should I bear it 
— to be dumb? to be dethroned? I am afraid I should bear it 
ill. After all, one may be a coward without knowing it.” 

“Do not speak of it!” said Vere, quickly, with a sense of 
'pain. Mute! That voice which she thought had all the melody 
that poets dream of when they write of angels! It hurt her 
even to imagine it. 

“It could not be worse than Siberia, and men live through 
that,” said Correze. “Have you not seen, princess, at a great 
ball some one disappear quickly and quietly, and heard a 
whisper run through the dancers of ‘Tmsk,’ and caught a look 
on some few faces that told you a tarantass was going out 
into the darkness, over the snow, full gallop, with a political 
prisoner between his guards? Ah, it is horrible! When one 
has seen it it makes one feel cold, even at noon in midsummer, 
to remember it.” 

“Russia is always terrible,” said Vere, with a little shudder. 
“Nowhere on earth are there such ghastly contrasts ; you live in 


230 


MOTHS. 


a hothouse with your palms, and the poor are all round you l» 
the ice; everything is like that.” # 

“And yet you are Russian,” said Correze, a little cruelly and 
bitterly; for he had never forgiven her quick descent into her 
mother’s toils, her quick acceptance of temptation. “You are 
certainly Russian. You are no longer Vere even: you are Prin- 
cess Vera.” 

‘ ‘ I am always Vere,” she said, in a low tone. “ They must call 
me what they will, but it alters nothing.” 

“And Vera is a good name, too,” said Correze, bending his eye 
almost sternly on hers. “ It means Truth.” 

“Yes; it means that.” 

He glided into the grass at the foot of the trees, and sat there, 
leaning B on his elbow, and looking toward her: it was the atti- 
tude in which she had seen him first upon the beach at Trouville. 

He was always graceful in all he did; the soft afternoon light 
was upon his face; he had thrown his broad felt hat upon the 
grass; a stray sunbeam wandered in the bright brown of his 
hair. 

Vere glanced at him, and was about to speak, then hesitated— 
paused — at last unclosed her lips so long shut in silence. 

“ You remember that you bade me keep myself unspotted from 
the world?” she said, suddenly. “ I want to tell you that I strive 
always to do so; yes, I do. I was never ruled by ambition and 
vanity — as you think. I cannot tell you more; but, if you un- 
derstand me at all, you will understand that that is true.” 

“ I knew it without your telling me.” 

He ceased to remember that ever he had suspected her or ever 
reproached her. It was a mystery to him that this proud, strong, 
pure nature should have ever been brought low by any force; but 
he accepted the fact of it as men in their faith accept miracles. 

“ She was such a child; who can tell what they did or said?” he 
mused, as an infinite tenderness and compassion came over him. 
This woman was not twenty yet, and she had tasted all the 
deepest bitterness of life and all its outrages of passion and of 
vicel 

She was to him like one of the young saints of old, on whom 
tyrants and torturers spent all the filth and fury of their 
will, yet could not touch the soul or break the courage of the 
thing that they dishonored. 

■Woman had not taught him reverence; he had found them frail 
when he had not found them base; but as great a reverence as 
ever moved Gawaine or Sintram moved him toward Vere now. 
He feared to speak, lest he should offend her; it was hard to give 
her sympathy, even to give her comprehension, without seeming 
to offer her insult. He knew that she was too loyal to the man 
whose name she bore to bear to hear him blamed, with whatso- 
ever justice it might be. 

He was silent, while leaning on his arm and looking down up- 
on the cups and scepters of the green moss on which he rested. 
If he looked up at her face he feared his strength of self-control 
would fail him and his lips be loosened. 

Vere bound together his wild flowers one by one, Sh» 


MOTHS 


231 


longed for him to believe her guiltless of the low ambitions of 
the world; she could not bear that he should fancy the low 
temptations of the world’s wealth and rank had ever had power 
• rer her. 

Yet she was the wife of Sergius Zouroff. What could she 
hope to make him think in face of that one fact? 

Suddenly-he looked up at her; his brilliant eyes were dim with 
tears, yet flashed darkly with a somber indignation. 

“ I understand,” he said, at last, his old habit of quick and 
eloquent speech returning to him. “ I think I have always un - 
derstood without words; I think all the world does. And that 
is why one half of it at least has no forgiveness for you, 
princess.” 

He added the title with a little effort; it was as a curb on his 
memory, on his impulse; he set it as a barrier between him 
and her. 

“ It is I who do not understand,” said Vere, with a faint smile, 
and an accent of interrogation. She did not look away from 
the wood-flowers. His^eyes fed themselves on the lines of her 
delicate and noble features; he breathed quickly; the color came 
into his face. 

“ No, you do not understand,” he said, rapidly. “ There is your 
danger. There is your weakness. Do you know what it costs 
to be an innocent woman in the world you live in? — the great 
world, as it calls itself, God help us! To be chaste in mind and 
body, thought and deed, to be innocent in soul and substance, 
not merely with sufficient abstinence from evil not to endanger 
position, not merely with physical coldness that can deny the 
passions it is diverted to influence, but real chastity, real inno- 
cence, which recoils from the shadow of sin and shrinks from 
the laughter of lust. Do you know what the cost of such is? I 
will tell you. Their cost is isolation; the sneer they are branded 
with is ‘ out of fashion;’ no one will say it, perhaps, but all will 
make you feel it. If you be ashamed to go half clothed, if you 
be unwilling to laugh at innuendoes, if you be unable to under- 
stand an indecency in a song, or a gag at a theater, if you do not 
find a charm in suggested filth, if you do not care to have loose 
women for your friends, however high may be their rank, if 
adultery look to you all the worse because it is a domestic pet 
and plaything, and if immorality seem to you but the more 
shameful because it is romped with at the children’s hour, 
danced with at the queen’s ball, made a guest at the house-par- 
ties, and smuggled smilingly through the customs-officers of so- 
ciety — if you be so behind your time as this, you insult your 
generation; you are a reproach to it, and an ennui. The union 
of society is a Camorra or Mafia. Those who are not of it must 
at least subscribe to it and smile on it, or they are lost. There is 
your danger, my Princess of Truth. How can they forgive you, 
any one of them, the women who have not your loveliness and 
your mind, and to whom you are a perpetual, an unconscious, 
an inexorable rebuke? Clothed with innocence is metaphor and 
Kact with you; and do you understand the women of your world 
60 little yet as not to understand that they would pardon you the 


233 


MOTHS 


nakedness of vice much sooner than they ever will those stain 
less robes you share with the children and the angels?” 

He ceased; eloquence when he was moved was habitual as 
song had been to him in his childhood when he had gathered his 
sheep and goats on the green alp. He paused abruptly, because, 
had he spoken more, he would have uttered words that could 
never have been recalled, words that would have been set forever 
between them like a gulf of flame. 

Yere had listened; her face had flushed a little, then had grown 
paler than was even usual to her. She understood now well 
enough — too well; an intense sweetness and a vague shame 
came to her with his words — the one that he should read her 
soul so clearly, the other that he should know her path so dark, 
her fate so hateful. 

She gathered the wood-flowers together and rose. 

“ I am fai from the angels, and you think too well of me,” 
she said, with a tremor in her voice. “ I think the sun is setting; 
it grows late.” 

Correze rose, with a sigh, to his feet, and raised her hat from 
the ground. 

“Yes. It will soon be dark, — very dark to me. Princess, will 
you think of what I said? will -you be on your guard with your 
foes?” 

“ Who are they?” 

“ All women, most men. In a word, a world that is not fit for 
your footsteps.” 

Yere was silent, thinking. 

“ I have more courage than insight,” she said, with a little 
smile, at last; “ and it is easier to me to endure than to influence. 
I think I influence no one, It must be my fault. They say I am 
wanting in sympathy.” 

“ Nay, the notes around you are too coarse to strike an echo 
from you : that is all. You have a perfect sympathy with all that 
is noble, but they never give you that.” 

“ Let us move quickly: the sun is set,*' she said, as she took 
her hat from him, and walked on down the forest-road. 

Neither spoke. In a little time they had reached the sluices, 
were the imprisoned timbers lay awaiting the weekly rush of 
the waters. There a little low carriage with some mountain- 
ponies, lent her by the court, was awaiting her. 

Keeping his wild blossoms of the forests in one hand, she gave 
him the other. 

X shall see you to-morrow?” she asked, with the frank sim- 
plicity and directness of her nature. 

He hesitated a moment, then answered, “ To-night I go up in- 
to theThorstein ice-fields; we maybe away some days; but when 
I come down from the mountains, yes; certainly yes, madame, 
t will have the honor of saluting you once more. And I wilt 
brine: vou some edelweiss, It is the flower they call you after in 
£aris.” 

“ Do they? I did not know it. Adieu.” 

# Her little postilion. & boy from the Imperial stables, with e 
silver horn and a ribboned and tasseled dress, cracked his whip, 


MOTHS. 


aw 

64/0 

lad the ponies went away at a trot down toward the valley, 
whilst beyond, the last brightness of daylight was shining 
above the gray-white sheet of the Carl Eisfeld that rose in view. 

Correze stood on the edge of the wilderness of timber, lying in 
disorder in the dry bed of the river, awaiting the loosening of the 
White Brook floods to float them to the Traun. Some birds be- 
gan singing in the wood, as the sun sat behind the glacier. 

“They are singing in my heart, too,” thought Correze, “ bu- 
must not listen to them. Heine knew the caprice and the tr; 
edy of fate. He wrought no miracle to make the pine and the 
palm-tree meet.” 

The days that followed dragged slowly ewer the head of 
Vere. 

Ischl, in its nook between the hills, has always a certain sad- 
ness about it, and to her it seemed grown gray and very dull. 
The glaciers of Dachstein and Thorstein gleamed whitely afar 
off, and her thoughts were with the hunters underneath those 
buttresses of ice in the haunts of the steinbock and the vulture. 

The perpetual clatter of the duchess’ voluble tongue, and the 
chatter of society that was always about her — even here — in the 
heart of the Salzkammergut — wearied her and irritated her more 
than usual. She felt a painful longing for that soft deep voice 
of Correze, which to her never spoke a commonplace or a 
compliment, for the quick instinctive sympathy which he gave 
her without alarming her loyalty or wounding her pride. 

“You are very dull, Vera,” said the duchess, impatiently at 
length. 

“ I am never very gay,” said Vere, coldly. “You knew that 
when you offered to accompany me.” 

“Your husband wished us to be together,” said Madame 
Jeanne, a little angrily. 

“ You are very kind— to my husband— to so study his wishes,” 
said Vere, with a certain challenge in her glance. But the 
duchess did not take up the challenge. 

“ Correze has told her something,” she thought. 

To quarrel with Vere was the last thing she wished to do. She 
laughed carelessly, said something pleasant, and affected to be 
charmed with Ischl. 

They went to the Imperial villa, rode a great deal, wev? courted 
by the notabilities as befitted one of the loveliest ana one of the 
wittiest women of the time; and the five days slipped away, as 
the Traun water slid under its bridges and over its falls. 

Vere began to listen wistfully for the tidings of the return of 
the Kaiser’s hunting-party. One morning at breakfast she heard 
that the Emperor had come back at daybreak. But of Correze 
there was nothing said. 

Had it been any other memory than that of Correze, she would 
nave been disgusted and angered with herself at his occupation 
of her thoughts, but he so long had been to her an ideal, an ab- 
straction, an embodiment of all high and heroic things, a living 
f*oem, that his absorption of her mind and memory had no alarm 
ior her. He was still an ideal figure— now, when he was lost in 
>;he mists of the ice-fields of the Dachstein, as in the winter 


234 MOTHS. 

when before her in the creation of Beethoven, of Mozart, and of 
Meyerbeer. 

A little later that morning a jager brought to the Kaiser inn 
hotel a grand golden eagle, shot so that it had died instantane- 
ously and been picked up upon the snow in all its beauty of 
plumage, without a feather ruffled. He brought also a large 
cluster of edelweiss from the summit of Thorstein, and a letter. 
The letter was to Madame de Sonnaz from Correze. 

She was sitting opposite to Yere on the balcony that fronted 
the’ bridge. 

“ From Der Freischutz!” she said, with a laugh. “ He has not 
shot his own arm off, like Roger, that is evident.” 

Veredid not raise her head from her lace-work. 

It had been written in the hamlet hut under the Dachstein- 
spitze, and was in pencil. After graceful opening compliments, 
in which no one knew better than himself how to make the com- 
monplace triviality of formula seem spontaneous and fresh, it 
went on: 

“ I have shot a nobler creature than myself: men generally do 
when they shoot at all. Emblematic of the Napoleonic cause to 
which Madame la Duchesse has dedicated herself — inasmuch as it 
has lived on carrion, and, though golden, it will be rotten in a 
day, or at best stuffed with straw — I desire to lay it at the feet of 
Madame Jeanne, where its murderer has ever longed, but never 
dared, to prostrate himself. I offer the edelweiss to Madame la 
Princesse Zouroff, as it is well known to be her emblem. It has 
no other value than that of representing her by living at an alti- 
tude where nothing but snow and the star-rays presume to share 
its solitude.” 

He said, in conclusion, that his hunting-trip having taken up 
the five days which he had allotted himself for Ischl, he feared 
he should see neither of them again until they met in Paris in 
winter, as his engagements took him at once to the Hague, and 
thence to Dresden, where there were special performances in 
honor of one of the gods of his old faith — Gluck. 

“ Very pretty,” reflected the Duchesse Jeanne as she read. “ I 
suppose he reached the edelweiss himself, or he could scarcely 
have gathered it. I suppose Vera will understand that part of the 
* emblem.’ ” 

But, though she thought so, she did not say so: she was a 
courageous woman, but not quite courageous enough for that. 
She gave the edelweiss and the note together to her companion, 
and only said with a little smile, “Correze always writes such 
pretty notes. It is an accomplishment that has its dangers. 
There is scarcely a good-looking woman in Paris who has not a 
bundle, more or less big, of his letters — all with that tell-tale 
suggestive device of his — that silver Love, with one wing caught 
in a thorn-bush of roses: he drew it himself. You saw it on his 
flag at the Kermesse. Oh, of course it is not on this paper. He 
scribbled this in some chalet of the Dachstein. I will have my 
eagle stuffed, and it shall have real rubies for eyes, and I will 
put it in my dining-room in Paris, and Correze for his sins shall 
sit underneath it and pledge the Violet and the Bee. Not that 


MOTHS. 


235 


he ever will, though; if he have any political faith at all, he is 
a Legitimist — if he be not a Communist. But I don’t think he 
thinks about those things. He told me once that nightingales do 
not build either in new stucco or in old timber — that they only 
wanted a bush of rose-laurel. He is a mortel fantasque, you 
know, and people have spoiled him. He is very vain, and he 
thinks himself a Sultan.” 

All the while the duchess was studying narrowly her compan- 
ion as she spoke. 

Yere, without any apparent attention to it, put her edelweiss 
in an old gold hunting-goblet that she had bought that morning 
in one of the little dark shops of Ischl; and the duchess could tell 
nothing from her face. 

In her heart Yere felt a sense of irritation and disappointment. 
The note seemed to her flippant, the homage of it insincere, and 
his departure unnecessary and a slight. She did not know that 
he wanted to turn aside from her the suspicion of a woman in 
whom he foresaw a perilous foe for her, and that to disarm 
worldly perils he used worldly weapons. Vere no more under- 
stood that than one of Chaucer’s heroines, with straight glaive 
and simple shield, would have understood the tactics of a game 
of Kriegspiel. 

And why did he go? 

She was far from dreaming that he went to avoid her. The 
song of Heine did not mean to her all that it meant to him. 
That she had some place in his memory, some hold on his inter- 
est, she thought — but nothing more; and even that she almost 
doubted now; how could he write of her to Jeanne de Sonnaz. 

A cold and cruel fear that she had deceived herself in trusting 
him seized on her; she heard of him always as capricious, as un- 
staple, as vain; who could tell, she thought? Perhaps she had 
only given him food for vanity and for laughter. Perhaps his 
seriousness and his sympathy had been but a mere passing mood, 
an emotion, no more real than those he assumed so perfectly 
upon his stage. 

The doubt hurt her cruelly, and did not stay long with her, 
for her soul was too noble to harbor distrust. Yet at her ear 
Jeanne de SoDnaz perpetually dropped slight words, little stories, 
shrewd hints, that all made him the center of adventures as 
varied and as little noble as those of any hero of amorous com- 
edy. Ever and again a chill sickening doubt touched her, that 
she, at once the proudest and the humblest woman in the world, 
had been the amusement of an hour to a brilliant but shallow 
persijieur. 

She carried the gold goblet with the edelweiss of the Thorstein 
into her own chamber, and, when quite alone, she burst into tears. 

She never shed tears now. It had seemed to her as if they 
were scorched up by the arid desolation of her life. They did 
her good like dew in drought. So much she owed Correze. 

Correze himself at that hour — having taken leave at daybreak 
of the Imperial hunter and his courtly companions, who were 
returning into Ischl— was walking by his guide’s side down the 
face of the Dachstein towards the g:een Rauris range, meaning 


288 


MOTHS. 


to go across thence into the beautiful valley of Ens and descend 
next day into the Maine! ling Pass between the Salzkammergut 
and Styria. He was still at a great elevation, still amidst snow 
and ice, and the Rauris lay below him like a green billowy sea. 
There was some edelweiss in his path, and he stooped and 
plucked a little piece and put it in his wallet. 

“ Oh, ice-flower, you are not colder than my heart,” he said to 
himself. “But it is best to go; best for her. I will dedicate my- 
self to you, ice-flower, and of the roses I will have no more; no, 
and no more of the ‘ lilies and languor.’ Edelweiss, you shall 
iiv'e with me and be my amulet. You will wither and shrivel 
and be nothing, but you will remind me-of my vow, and, if 
others will rage, let them. To the ice-flower I will be true as far 
as a man in his weakness can be. Will that denial be love? In 
the old chivalrous days they read it so. They kept their faith 
though they never saw their lady's face. The Duchesse Jeanne 
would laugh — and others too.” 

And he went down over the rugged stony slope, with the 
snow deep on either side, and the green ice glistening at his feet, 
and the woods of the Rauris lifting themselves up from the 
clouds and the gray air below; and there on Dachstein, where 
never note of nightingale was heard since the world was made, 
this nightingale, that ladies loved and that roses entangled in 
their thorns, sang wearily to himself the song of Heine — the song 
of the palm-tree and the pine. 


CHAPTER XXx. 

The days went on, and the duchess made them gay enough, 
being one of those persons who cannot live without excitement, 
and who make it a germinate wherever they are. Carried in her 
chaise-a-porteurs, playing chemin defer on her balcony, waltzing 
at the little dances of the Imperial court, making excursions in 
the pine woods or down the lakes, she surrounded herself with 
officers and courtiers, and created around her that atmosphere 
of diversion, revelry, and intrigue without which a woman of 
our world can no more live than a mocking-bird without a globe 
of water. But all the while she never relaxed in a vigilant ob- 
servation of her companion; and the departure of Correze baffled 
and annoyed her. 

She had had a suspicion, and it had gone out in smoke. She 
had spent much ingenuity in contriving to bring Yere to the 
Salzkammergut, and after having disbursed much in discovering 
the projects for the summer sojourns of Correze; and with his 
departure all her carefully-built house of cards fell to pieces. 
She did not understand it; she was completely bewildered, as he 
had intended her to be, by the airy indifference of his message to 
her companion, and his failure to return from the glaciers into the 
valley. She regretted that she had troubled herself to be buried 
for a month in this green tomb among the hills; but it was im- 
possible to change her imprisonment now. They had begun the 
routine of the waters, and she had to solace herself as best she 
might with the Imperial courtesies, and with sending little notes 


MOTHS. 


237 


to her friends, the sparkle of which was like the brightness of 
an acid drink and contrasted strongly with the few grave con- 
strained lines that were penned by Yere. 

One day, when they had but little more time to spend on the 
Traun banks, she got together a riding and driving-party to Old 
Aussee. 

Aussee is quaint, and ancient, and charming, where it stands 
on its three-branched river; its people are old-fashioned and sim- 
ple; its encircling mountains and its dark waters are full of peace 
and solemnity. When the gay world breaks in on these quiet old 
towns and deep lakes and snow-girt hills, there seems a profanity 
in the invasion. It is only for a very little while. At the first 
breath of autumn the butterflies flee, and the fishermen and salt- 
workers and timber-hewers and chamois-hunters are left alone 
with their waters and their hills. 

The duchess’s driving- party was very picturesque, very showy, 
very noisy; “ good society ” is always very noisy nowadays, and 
has forgotten that a loud laugh used to be “ bad form.” They 
were all people of very high degree, but they all smoked, they all 
chattered shrilly, and they all looked very much as if they had been 
cut out of the Vie Parisienne and put in motion Old Aussee, with 
its legends, its homely Styrian townsfolk, and its grand circle of 
snow-clad summits, was nothing to them; they liked the Opera- 
ring, the Bois, or Pall-Mall. 

Vere got away from them, and went by herself to visit the 
Spitalkirche. The altar is pure old German work of the four- 
teenth century, and she had heard of it from Kaulbach. In 
these old Austrian towns the churches are always very reverend 
places, dark and tranquil, overladen indeed with ornament and 
images, but too full of shadow for these to much offend; there is 
the scent of centuries of incense; the ivories are yellow with the 
damp of ages. Mountain suzerains and bold ritters, whose deeds 
are still sung of in twilight to the cithern, sleep beneath the 
moss-grown pavement; their shields and crowns are worn flat to 
the stone they were embossed on by the passing feet of genera' 
tions of worshipers. High above in the darkness there is always 
some colossal carved or molded Christ. Through the half- 
opened iron-studded door there is always the smell of pine 
woods, the gleam of water, the greenness of Alpine grass; often, 
too, there is the silvery falling of rain, and the fresh smell of ifc 
comes through the church, by whose black benches and dim 
lamps there will be sure to be some old bent woman praying. 

The little church was more congenial to Yere than the com- 
panionshship of her friends, who were boating on the Traun, 
while their servants unpacked their luncheon and their wines. 
She managed to elude them, and began to sketch the wings of 
the altar. She sent her servant to wait outside. The place was 
dreary and dark: the pure Alpine air blew in from an open pane 
in a stained window; there was the tinkle of a cow-bell and the 
sound of running water from without; a dog came and looked 

her. 

The altar was not an easy one to .copy; the candles were not 


238 


MOTHS . 


lighted before it, and the daylight, gray and subdued without, 
as it is ,so often here, was very faint'^ within. 

“After all, what is the use of my copying it?” she thought, 
with a certain bitterness. “ My husband would tell me, if I 
cared for such an old thing, to send some painter from Munich 
to do it for me; and perhaps he would be right. It is the only 
mission we have, to spend money.” 

It is a mission that most women think the highest and most 
blest on earth; but it did not satisfy Vere. She seemed to her- 
self so useless, so stupidly, vapidly, frivolously useless; and her 
nature was one to want work, and noble work. 

She sat still, with her hands resting on her knees, and the 
color and oils lying on the stone floor beside her untouched. 
She looked at the dark bent figure of the old peasant near, who 
had set a little candle before a side-altar and was praying fer- 
vently. She was a gray-headed, brown, wrinkled creature, 
dressed in the old Styrian way. She looked rapt and peaceful 
as she prayed. When she rose, Yere spoke to her, and the old 
woman answered willingly. Yes, she was very old; yes, she 
had always dwelt in Aussee; her husband had worked in the 
salt-mines and been killed in them; her sons had both died, one 
at Koniggratz, one in a snow- J ^ 1 1 ’ x 



all long ago; she had some 


mines and on the timber-rafts; one had broken his leg going 
down the Danube with wood; she had gone to him, he was only 
a boy; she could not get him home any other way, so she had 
rowed him back in a little flat-boat, rowed and steered herself; 
it was winter, the Traun flood was strong, but they had come 
home safe; now he was well again, but he had seen the soldiers 
in Vienna, and a soldier he would be; there was no keeping him 
any more on the timber- rafts. Vienna was very fine; yes, but 
herself she thought Aussee was finer; she had lighted that taper 
for her boy Ulrich; he was going to the army to-morrow; she 
had begged the saints to watch over him; the saints would let 
her see them all again one day. Had she much to live on? No; 
the young men gave her what they could, and she spun and 
knitted, and life was cheap at Aussee, and then one could always 
pray, that was so much, and the saints did answer, not always, 
of course, because there were so many people speaking to them 
all at once, but yet often: God was good. 

Vere took her by the hand, the rough gnarled hand like a bit 
of old oak bough, that had rowed the boat all the way from 
Vienna, and, having no money with her, slipped into it some 
gold porte-bonheurs off her wrist. 

“ If I stay I will come and see you. Tell me the way to find 
your house.” 

“ I shall never see you again,” said the old woman with swim- 
ming eyes. “ One does not see Our Lady twice face to face till 
one gets up to Heaven.” And she went away wondering, feeling 
the gold circlets on her arm, and telling her gossips, as they knit- 
ted m the street, that she had seen either Our Lady or Saint 
Elizabeth — one of the two it must surely have been. 
fc^When she had gone, leaving her little taper, like a glow-worm, 


MOTHS. 


m 

behind her, Vere still sat on, forgetful of the gay people who 
were carrying their coquetries, their jealousies, and their charms 
on to the Traun water. She had everything that in the world’s 
esteem is worth having; the poor, looking at her, k envied her as 
one of those who walk on velvet and never feel the stones She 
had youth, she had beauty, she had a great position; yet, as she 
sat there, she herself envied the life of the poor. It was real; it 
was in earnest; it had the affections to sustain and solace it. 
What a noble figure that woman, rowing her sick boy down the 
river in the autumn rains, looked to her beside her own mother! 
Unconsciously she stretched out her arms into the vacant air, 
those slender beautiful white arms, that Paris said were sculp- 
turally faultless, and that her husband liked to see bare to the 
shoulder at her balls, with a circle of diamonds clasping them: 
she felt they would have force in them to row through the rains 
and against the flood, if the boat bore a freight that she 
loved. 

But love was impossible for her. 

At the outset of her life the world had given her all things ex- 
cept that one. 

They had shut her in a golden cage: what matter if the bird 
starved within ? It would be the bird’s ingratitude to fate. 

Even if her offspring lived — she shuddered as she thought of 
it — they would be his, they would have his passions and his 
cruelties ; they would be taken away from her, reared in creeds 
and in ways alien to her; they would be Zouroff princes whose 
baby tyrannies would find a hundred sycophants, not her little 
simple children to lead in her own hand up to God. 

As she sat there the sound of the organ arose, and rolled softly 
through the church. It was a time-worn instrument, and of 
little volume and power, but the rise and fall of the notes sounded 
solemn and beautiful in this old mountain church. The player 
was playing the Requiem of Mozart. 

When the last chords thrilled away in silence, of that triumph 
of a mortal over the summons of death, a voice rose alone and 
sang the Minuit Chretien of Adam. 

She started and looked round into the gloom of the gray church. 
She saw no one; but the voice was that of Correze. 

Then she sat motionless, following the beauty of the Noel as it 
rose higher and higher, as though the angels were bearing the 
singer of it away from earth, as the angels of Orcagna bear on 
their wings the disembodied souls. 

For a while the church was filled with the glory of rejoicing, 
with the rapture of the earth made the cradle of God: then all 
at once there was silence. His voice had not seemed to cease, 
but rather to float farther and farther above until it reached the 
clouds and grew still from the fullness of an unimaginable joy, 
of an unutterable desire fulfilled. One or two minor chords of 
the organ, faint as sighs, followed, then they too were still. 

Vere sat motionless. 

Surprise, wonder, curiosity, were far away from, her; all minor 
emotions were lost in that infinite sense of consolation and of 


240 


MOTES. 


immortality; even of him who sang she ceased for the moment 
to have any memory. 

After a little while a lad came to her over the gray stones, a 
lad of Aussee, flaxen-haired and blue- eyed, in the white shir!) 
that served him as a chorister. 

He brought her a great bouquet of Alpine roses, and in the 
midst of the roses was the rare, dark-blue Wolfinia Carinthiana 
which grows upon the slopes of the Gartnerkogel, and nowhere 
else in all the world, they say. 

, “ The foreigner for whom I blew the organ-bellows bade me 
bring you this,” said the boy. “ He sends you his homage.” 

“ Is he in the church?” 

“ Yes; he savs, may he see you one moment?” 

“Yes.” 

Yere took the Alpine bouquet in her hands. She was still in a 
sort of trance. 

The Noel was still upon her ears. 

She did not even wonder how or why he came there. Since 
she had heard the song of Heine it seemed to her so natural to 
hear his voice. 

She took her great bouquet in her hands and went slowly 
through the twilight of the church and towards the open doors. 
She was thinking of the little dog-rose gathered on the cliffs by 
the sea in Calvados. 

In another moment Correze stood before her in the dusk. A 
stray sunbeam wandering through the dusty panes of the window 
fell on his bright uncovered head. 

“I thought you were far away,” she said, with an effort; he* 
heart was beating. “ I thought you were at the Hague?” 

He made a little gesture with his hand. 

“ I shall be there. But could you think I would leave Austria 
so abruptly when you were in it? Surely not!” 

She was silent. 

In his presence, with the sweetness of his voice on her ear, all 
her old pure and perfect faith in him was strong as in the childish 
hour when she had heard him call the lark his little brother, 

“ You wrote to Madame de Sonnaz ” 

“ I wrote to Madame de Sonnaz many things that I knew shd 
would not believe,” he rejoined, quickly. “ Oh, my Princess of 
Faith! one must fight the spirits of this world with worldly 
weapons, or be worsted. You are too true for that. Alas! how 
will the battle go with you in the end?” 

He sighed impatiently. Yere was silent. 

She but partly understood him. 

“ Have you been among the glaciers all this time?” she asked, 
at length. 

“No. I went to the Gitschthal in Carinthia. Do you know 
that yonder blue flower only growls there on the side of the Gart- 
nerkogel, and nowhere else in all the breadth of Europe? I 
thought it was a fitter emblem for you than the edelweiss, which 
is bought and sold in every Alpine village. So I thought I would 
go and fetch . it and bring it to you. The Gitschthal is very 
charming; it is quite lonely, and untrodden except by its own 


MOTHS 


241 


mountaineers. You would care for it. It made me a boy again!” 

“ You went only for that?” 

Only for that. What can one give you? You have every- 
thing. Prince Zouroff bought you the Roc’s egg, but I think he 
would not care to climb for the Wolfinia. It is only a mountain- 
flower.” 

Vere was silent 

It was only a mountain-flower; but, as he spoke of it, he gave 
it the meaning of the flower of Oberon. 

Had she any right to hear him ? The dusky shadows of the 
church seemed to swim before her sight; the beauty of the Noel 
seemed still to echo on her ear. 

“ How could you tell that I was here?” she murmured. 

He smiled. 

“ That was very easy. I was in Ischl at daybreak. I would 
have sung a reveil under your window while the east was red., 
only Madame Jeanne would have taken it to herself. You go to 
Russia?” 

“ In three days — yes.” 

Correze was silent. A slight shudder passed over him, as if 
the cold of Russia touched him. 

Suddenly he dropped on his knee before her. 

“ I am but a singer of songs,” he murmured. “But I honor 
you as greater and graver men cannot do, perhaps. More than 1 
do, none can. They will speak idly of me to you, I dare say, 
and evil too, perhaps; but do not listen, do not believe. If you 
ever need a servant — or an avenger — call on me. If I be living 
I will come. Alas ! alas ! neither I, nor any man, can save the 
ermine from the moths, the soul from the world; but you are in 
God’s hands, if God there be above us. Farewell.” 

- Then he kissed the hem of her skirts and left her. 

She kept the mountain-flowers in her hand, and knew how her 
doubts had wronged him. 

Ten minutes later she left the church, hearing the voices of 
her friends. At the entrance she was met by Madame de Son- 
naz, whose high silver heels, and tall ebony cane, and skirts of 
cardinal red, drew after her an amazed group of Styrian chil- 
dren and women with their distaffs. 

“ Where have you been, Yere dear?” asked Duchesse Jeanne. 
“We have missed you for hours. We have been on the river, 
and we are very hungry. I am dying for a quail and a peach. 
What is that dark-blue flower? does that grow in the church?” 

A gray-headed English ambassador, Lord Bangor, who was in 
the rear of the duchess, and was a keen and learned botanist, 
bent his eye-glasses on the rare blue blossom. 

“ The Wolfinia!” he cried, in delighted wonder. “ The Wolfinia 
Carinthiana! that is the very phoenix of all flowers! Oh, prin- 
cess, if it be not too intrusive, may one beg to know where ever 
you got that treasure? Its only home is leagues away on the 
Gitschthal.” 

“ It came from the Gitschthal; a boy brought it to me,” 
answered Yere; yet, though the words were literally true, she 


242 MOTHS. 

felt herself color as she spoke them, because she did not sal 
quite all the truth. 

Duchesse Jeanne looked at her quickly, and thought to her- 
self, “ Correze sent her those wild flowers, or brought them tc 
her. I do not believe in La Haye.” 

Vere, indifferent to them all, stood in the church porch, with 
the soft gray light shed on her, and the alpine roses in her hands, 
and the spell of the Noel was still with her. “Lift up my soul,” 
prays the Psalmist; nothing will ever answer that prayer as 
music does. 

“ What a beautiful creature she is!” said the old ambassador 
incautiously to the Duchesse Jeanne, as he looked at her, with 
that soft light from sunless skies upon her face. 

The Duchesse Jeanne cordially assented. “ But,” she added, 
with a smile, “ people say so because she is faultlessly made, face 
and form; they say so, and there is an end. It is like sculpture; 
people go mad about a bit of china, a length of lace, a little 
picture, but no one ever goes mad about marble. They praise— 
and pass,” 

“Not always,” says the imprudent diplomatist, forgetful of 
diplomacy. ‘ 4 1 think no one would pass here if they saw the 
slightest encouragement or permission to linger.” 

“ But there is not the slightest. What I said: she is sculptural.” 

“ How happy is Zouroff !” 

“Ah, call no man happy till he is dead. Who knows if she 
will be always marble?” 

“ She will never be a woman of the period,” said the old man, 
with some asperity. “ I think her portrait will never be sold in 
shops. So far she will forever miss fame.” 

“ It is amusing to see oneself in shops,” said Madame de Sonnaz. 
“Now and then I see a little crowd before mine; and the other 
day I heard a boy say — a boy who had a tray full of pipes on his 
head — ‘ Tiens! Celle-ci; elle est joliment laide, maise elle est crane, 
la petite; v’la!’ That was at my portrait.” 

“ It is popularity, madame,” said the ambassador, with a grave 
bow. “ The boy with the pipes knew his period.” 

“ And how much that is to know!” said the lady, with vivacity. 
“ It is better to be the boy with the pipes than Pygmalion. To 
know your own times, and adapt yourself to them, is the secret 
of success in everything, from governing to advertising. Now- 
adays a statesman has no chance unless he is sensational; a 
musician none unless he is noisy; an artist none unless he is 
either diseased or gaudy; a government none unless it is feverish, 
startling, and extravagant. It is the same with a woman. To 
be merely faultlessly beautiful is nothing, or next to nothing; you 
must know how to display it, how to provoke with it, how to tint 
it here, and touch it there, and make it, in a word, what my boy 
with the pipes called me. I have not a good feature in my face, 
you know, and I have a skin like a yellow plum, that Piver can do 
nothing to redeem, and yet ninety-nine of the whole world of 
men will look at that perfect beauty of Princess Zouroff, praise 
her, and leave her to come to me. The boy with the pipes is a 


MOTHS. 


243 

man kind, I assure you. Will you tell me, pray, why it 

ISr 

“Excuse me, madame,” said the old man, with another low 
bow. “ To explain the choice of Paris is always a most painful 
dilemma; the goddesses are all so admirable ” 

“ No phrases. You are old enough to tell me the truth; or, if 
you like, I will tell it to you.” 

“I should certainly prefer that.” 

“Web ” 

“Web?” 

“ I will tell you, then, in her own husband’s words: elle ne sait 

pas s’encannailler.” 

And the duchess, with a cigarette in her mouth, laughed, and 
carried her cardinal red skirts, and her musical silver heels, over 
the stones of Aussee to a raft on the river, which the skill of her 
attendants had turned into a very pretty, awning-shaded, flower- 
decked barge, where their breakfast was spread in the soft gray 
air above the green water. 

Such women as Duchesse Jeanne or Lady Dolly are never in 
the country; they take Paris and London with them wherever 
they go. 

The old diplomatist sat silent through the gay and clamorous 
breakfast, looking often at Yere, beside whose plate lay the 
Alpine roses, and in whose ruffled lace at her throat was the blue 
Wolfinia. 

“ Good God! what an age we live in!” he thought — “in which 
a husband makes it a reproach to his wife that she does not un- 
derstand how to attract other men ! I do believe that we have 
sunk lower than the Romans of the empire: they did draw a 
line between the wife and the concubine. We don’t draw any. 
Perhaps, after all, the Nihilists are right, and we deserve cutting 
down, root and branch, in our corruption. The disease wants the 
• knife.” 

He muttered something of his thoughts to his next neighbor, 
the young Prince Trafoi. 

The young man nodded, smiled and answered, “ Duchesse 
Jeanne is quite right. Princess Vera is as beautiful as a Titian; 
but one gets tired looking at a Titian that one knows will never 
come into the market. Or rather she is like a classic statue in one 
of the old patrician museums in Rome. You know nothing will 
ever get the statue into your collection; you admire and pass. 
The other day, at the Hotel Drouot, there was a tobacco-pot in 
Karl Theodor porcelain, that was disputed by half Europe, and 
went at a fabulous price: the woman we like resembles that 
tobacco-pot; it is exquisite, but it can be got at, and anybody’s 
hand may go into it; and even in its beauty — for Karl Theodor 
is so beautiful — it is suggestive and redolent of a coarse pleas- 
ure.” 

“All that is very well,” said Lord Bangor; “but, though it 
may explain the modern version of Paris’s choice, it does not 
explain why in marriage ” 

“Yes, it does,” said the younger man. “The Roman noble 
does not care a straw for the statues that ennoble his vestibule; 


MOTHS . 


Ail 

if saw them once being disputed in the Rue t)rouot he wouM 
quicken into an owner’s appreciation. Believe me, the only 
modern passion that is really alive is envy. How should any 
man care for what is passively and undisputedly his! To please 
us a woman must be hung about with other men’s desires, as a 
squaw with beads.” 

“ Then you, too, would wish your wife to savoir s’encanail « 
ler ?” 

, “Not my own wife,” said the young man, with a laugh, 
“But then I belong to an old school, though I am young: 
Austrians all do.” 

“ Whilst Russians,” said the old man, savagely, “ Russians are 
all Bussy-Rabutins crossed with Timour Beg. By all, I mean of 
course the five or seven thousand of ‘ Personages ’ that are all 
one sees of any nation in society. The nation, I dare say, is well 
enough, for it has faith, if its faith takes many odd shapes, and 
it can be very patient. 

The Duchesse Jeanne called aloud to him that he must not 
talk politics at breakfast. 

Then the breakfast came to an end, with many fruits and 
sweetmeats and Vienna dainties left to be scrambled for by 
t' 3 Aussee water-babies; and the driving-party of Madame de 
Sonnaz began their homeward way over the Potschen-Joch. 
The old ambassador contrived to saunter to the carriages beside 
Vere. 

“ If I were a score of years younger, madame,” he said, with 
a glance at the dark blue flower at her throat, “ I would beg you 
to make me your knight and give me the Wolfinia for my badge. 
It is the only flower you ought to wear, for it is the only one 
really emblematic of you: the edelweiss, that they call you after 
in Paris, is too easily found — and too chilly. Have you liked 
the day? has it tired you very much?” 

“ It takes a great deal to tire me physically,” said Vere. “ I 
am stronger than they think.” 

“Bat mentally you tire soon, because the atmosphere you are 
in does not suit you, is it not so?” 

“ I suppose so. I do not care for the chatter of the salons 
amidst the mountains.” 

“ No: 

“ 1 Le vent qui vient a travers les montagnes 
Me rendra fou — ’ 

is a fitter spirit in which to meet the glaciers face to face. I 
think people either have a love of the mountains that is a religion, 
that is unutterable, sacred, and intense, or else are quite indiffer- 
ent to them — like our friends. I know a man in whom they re- 
main a religion despite all the counter-influences of the very gay- 
est of worlds and most intoxicating of lives. I do not know 
whether you ever met him, I mean the singer Correze.” 

“ Yes, I know him.” 

“He is a very keen mountaineer; he has a passion for the 
heights, not that of the mere climber of so many thousand feet, 
but rather of the dweller on the hills, whom nature has mad© a 


MOTHS. 


243 


poet too. I saw him first when he was a little lad in the hills 
above Sion. You know people always say that part of his story is 
not true, but it is quite true. I am not aware why people 
who have not genius invariably think that people of genius 
lie; but they do so. I suppose Mediocrity cannot comprehend 
Imagination failing to avail itself of its resources ! Three-and- 
twenty years ago, princess, I was already an old man, 
but more active than I am now. After a long and ar- 
duous season at my post I was allowing myself the luxury of an 
incognito tour, leaving my secretaries and servants at Geneva. 
No one enjoys the privacy and ease of such holidays like an old 
harness-worn public servant, and there is no harness heavier than 
diplomacy, though they do give it bells and feathers. One of 
those short — too short — summer days I had overwalked myself 
among the green Alps of the Valais, and had to rest at a con- 
siderable elevation, from which I was not very certain how I 
should get down again. It was an exquisite day — such a day as 
only the mountains can give one, with that exhilarating tonic in 
the air that does worried nerves more good than all the physicians. 
Almost unconsciously I repeated aloud in the fullness, of my 
heart, with a boyishness that I ought perhaps to have been 
ashamed of, but was not, the Thalysia; you will know it, princess; 
I have heard that you are a student that would have charmed 
Roger Ascham. As I murmured it myself, I heard a voice take 
up the Idyl and continue with the song of Lycidas— a pretty 
childish voice, that had laughter in it, laughter no doubt at my 
surprise. I turned and saw a little fellow with a herd of goats: 
he was a beautiful child about nine or ten years old. His Greek 
was quite pure. I was very astonished, and questioned him. He 
told me he was called Raphael de Correze. As it was near 
evening, he offered me to go down with him to his father’s hut, 
and I did so; and, as he trotted by my side, he told me that his 
father had taught him all he knew. He kept goats, he said, but he 
studied coo. I was belated, and should have fared ill but for the 
hospitality of that mountain-hut. I cannot tell you how greatly 
his father interested me. He was a scholar, and had all the look and 
bearing of a man of birth. He told me briefly how his father 
had taken to the mountains when the Revolution ruined the 
nobility of Savoy. He was then in feeble health ; he was anxious 
for the future of his boy, who was all alive with genius, . and 
mirth, and music, and sang to me, after the simple supper, in the 
sweetest boyish pipe that it has ever been my lot to hear. I left 
them my name, and begged them to use me as they chose; but I 
never heard anything from them after the bright morning walk 
when the boy guided me down into the high-road for Sion. I 
sent him some books and a silver flute from Geneva, but I never 
knew that he got them. My own busy life began again, and I am 
shocked to say that I forgot that hut in the Alps, though that 
tranquil homely interior was one of the prettiest pictures which 
life has ever shown me. Many years afterward, in Berlin, one 
night after the opera, going on to the stage with some of the 
princes to congratulate a new singer, who had taken the world 
by storm, the singer looked hard at me for a moment and then 


246 


MOTHS. 


smiled. 1 1 have the silver flute still, Excellency,’ he said. * I 
do hope you had the note I wrote you, to thank you for it, to 
Geneva.’ And then, of course, in that brilliant young tenor I 
knew my little goat-boy who had quoted Theocritus, and won- 
dered how I could have been so stupid as not to have remembered 
his name when I heard it in the public mouth. So I, for one, 
know that it is quite true that he is a mountaineer no less than 
he is an artist and a Marquis de Correze. They say he has been 
in Ischl; I wish I had known it, for I am always so glad to see 
him out of the whirl of cities, where both he and I, in our differ- 
ent ways, are too pressed for time to have much leisure for talk. 
He is a very charming companion, Correze. Forgive me, prin- 
cess, for telling you such a long story. Prosiness is pardoned to 
age; and here are the carriages.” 

Vere had listened with changing color, all the dejection and 
indifference passing from her face, and a light of pleasure and 
surprise shining in her frank, grave eyes. 

“ Do not apologize. You have interested me very much,” she 
said, simply. 

Ana the astute old man noticed that, as she spoke, she uncon- 
sciously touched the blue mountain- flower at her throat. 

“ Improbable as it vzeems,” he thought to himself, “ I would 
wager that it is Correze who gave her that Wolfinia. She is not 
as cold as they say. ‘ Elle ne sait pas s'encanailler .’ No; and she 
will never learn that modern science. But there are greater 
perils for great natures than the bath of mud, that they never 
will take though it is the fashion. The bath of mud breaks noth- 
ing, and mesdames come out of it, when they like, white as snow. 
But these people fall from the stars, and break everything as they 
fall, in them and under them. She is half marble still; she is not 
quite awake yet; but when she is— when she is, I would not wish 
to be Prince Sergius Zouroff!” 

The party went homeward in the fresh mountain-air, leaving 
the evening lights on Old Aussee lying amidst its many waters. 
Yere was very silent; her Alpine roses lay in her lap, the Minuit 
Chretien was on her ear. The sun had set when they descended 
into Ischl. Her servants came to meet her, and said that her 
husband had arrived. 

“ Quel preux chevalier de mari!” cried the Duchesse Jeanne, 
with her shrill laughter, that was like the clash of steel. 

“ Quel preux chevalier de mari!” repeated the Duchesse de 
Sonnaz to Prince Zouroff alone, as they stood on the balcony of 
the hotel after dinner. 

He laughed as he leaned over r the balustrade smoking. 
f “ Je Vai toujours ete,pour toi he whispered. 

The Duchesse de Sonnaz gave him a blow with her pretty fan, 
that Fantin had painted with some Loves playing blindman’s- 
buff. 

Vere was inside the room: she was intent upon her lace-work. 
The shaded light of a lamp fell on the proud, mournful calmness 
of her face. She wore black velvet with a high ruff of old 
flemish lace; she looked like a picture by Chardin., 


MOTHS. m 

Prmoe Zouroff sauntered in from the balcony and approached 
his wife. 

** Vera,” he said suddenly to her, “ they tell me you are great 
friends with that singing fellow Correze. Is it true?” 

Vere looked up from her lace-work. “Who say so?* 

Oh, people. Is it true?” 

“I have seen M. de Correze little, but I feel to know binq 
well.” 

She answered him the simple truth, as it seemed to be to her* 
self. 

“ Ah!” said Prince Zouroff; “ then write and tell him to come 
to Svir. We’ must have some grand music for the Tsarewitch, 
and you can offer him five hundred more roubles a night than 
the Petersburg opera gives him; he can have his own suite of rooms 
and his own tables; I know those artists give themselves airs.” 

Veredooked at him for a moment in astonishment, then felt 
herself grow cold and pale, with whatj emotion she scarcely 
knew. 

“ You had better let Anton write, if you wish it,” she answered, 
after a little pause. Anton was his secretary. “ But M. de Cor- 
reze will not come; he has many engagements fand I believe he 
never goes to private houses unless he goes as a guest, and then, 
of course, there is no question of money.” 

Zouroff was looking at her closely through his half-closed eye* 
lids. He laughed. 

“ Nonsense! If an artist cannot be hired the world is coming 
to an end. They have no right to prejudices, those people; and, 
in^point of fact, they only assume them to heighten the price. I 
prefer you should write yourself: you can give him any sum you 
like; but he shall come to Svir.” 

Vere hesitated a moment, then said, very calmly, “ It is not for 
me to write: Anton always does your business; let him do this.” 

The forehead of Zouroff grew clouded with a heavy frown: she 
had never contradicted or disobeyed him before. 

“ I order you to write, madame,” he said, sternly. “There is 
an end.” 

Vere rose, curtsied, and passed before him to a writing-table. 
There she wrote: 

“ Monsieur,— My husband desires me to beg you to do us the 
honor of visiting us at Svir on the fifteenth of next month, when 
the Tsarewitch will have the condescension to be with us. I 
believe, however, that you will be unable to do us this gratifica- 
tion, as I think your time is already too fully occupied. All ar- 
rangements you may wish to make in the event of your acceding 
to his desire you will kindly communicate to M. Zouroff. I beg 
to assure you of my distinguished consideration. 

“Vera, Princess Zouroff.” 

^She wrote rapidly, addressed the letter and handed it to her 
husband. 

“ Pooh!” he said, as he'read it, and tore it up. “ You write to 
the fellow as if he were a prince himself. You must not write 
to a singer in that fashion. Say we will pay him anything h© 


248 MOTHS. 

choose. It is a question d' argent ; there is no need for complh 
ments and consideration.” 

“You will pardon me, monsieur, I will not write with less 
courtesy than that.” 

“You will write as I choose to dictate.” 

“ No.” She spoke very quietly, and took up her lace- work. 

“ You venture to disobey me?” 

“ I will not disobey any absolute command of yours, but I will 
not insult a great artist because you wish me to do so.” 

There was a look of resolve and of contempt on her face that 
was new to him. She had always obeyed his caprices with a 
passive, mute patience that had made him believe her incapable 
of having will or judgment of her own. It was as strange to 
him as if a statue had spoken or a flower had frowned. He 
stared at her in surprise that was greater than his annoyance. 

“ Pardieu! what has come to you?” he said, fiercely. “ Take 
Up your pen and write what I have spoken.” 

“ Napoleon , tu foublies!” quoted the Duchesse Jeanne, as she 
came to the rescue with a laugh. “ My dear prince, pardon me, 
but your charming wife is altogether in the right. Correze is a 
great artist; emperors kneel before him: it will never do to send 
for him as if he were an organ-grinder — that is, at least, if you 
want him to come. Besides, Vera and he are old friends; they 
cannot be expected to deal with each other like entrepreneur and 
employe , in the sledge-hammer style of persuasion, which seems . 
to be your idea of beguiling stars to shine for you. Believe me, 

{ rour wife is right. Correze will never come to Svir at all un- 
ess ” 

“ Unless what?” 

“ Unless as her friend, and yours.” 

There was a little accent on the first pronoun that cast the 
meaning of many words into those few monosyllables. 

Zouroff watched his wife from under his heavy eyelids. 

Vere sat still and composed, taking up the various threads of 
her lace-pillows. She had said what she had thought courage 
and courtesy required her to say: to the effect of what she had 
said she was indifferent, and she did not perceive the meaning in 
the duchess’ words: a pure conscience is often a cause of blind- 
ness and deafness that are perilous. 

“When I have spoken ” began her husband, for he had the 

childishness of the true tyrant in him. 

Madame de Sonnaz puffed some cigarette-smoke into his face. 

“ Oh, Caesar, when you have spoken, what then? You have ne 
serfs now, even in Russia. You can have none of us knouted. 
You can only bow and yield to a woman’s will, like any other 
man. Voyons! I will write to Correze. I have known him ever 
since he first set all Paris sighing as Edgardo, and I will insinuate 
to him gently that he will find a bouquet on his table each day 
with a million roubles about the stalks of it; that will be delicate 
enough, perhaps, to bring him. But do you really wish for 
him? That is what I doubt.” 

“Why should you doubt it?” said the prince, with his sombef 
eyes still fastened on his wife. 


MOTHS. 


248 


Duchesse Jeanne looked at him and smiled; the smile saida 
great many things. 

“ Because it will cost a great deal,” she said, demurely, “ and 
I never knew that the Tsarewitch cared especially for music. He 
is not Louis of Bavaria.” 

Then she sat down and wrote a very pretty letter of invitation 
and cajolery and command, all combined. Vere never spoke; 
her husband paced up and down the room, angry at having been 
worsted, yet reluctant to oppose his friend Jeanne. 

It was the first disobedience of Vere’s since she had sworn him 
obedience at the altar. It gave him a strange sensation, half of 
rage, half of respect; but the mingling of respect only served to 
heighten and strengthen the rage. He had been a youth when 
the emancipation was given by Alexander to his people; and in 
his boyhood he had seen his servants and his villagers flogged, 
beaten with rods, driven out into the snow at midnight, turned 
adrift into the woods to meet the wolves, treated anyhow, as 
whim or temper dictated on the impulse of a moment’s wrath. 
The instinct of dominion remained strong in him, it always 
seemed to him that a blow was the right answer to any res- 
tive creature, whether dog or horse, man or woman. He had 
seen women scourged very often, and going in droves from 
Poland to Siberia. He could have found it in his heart to throw 
his wife on her knees and strike her now. Only he was a man of 
the world and knew what the world thought of such violence as 
that; and, in his own coarse way, he was a gentleman. 

Correze received the letter of Duchesse Jeanne one evening on 
the low sands of Schevening, where some of the noblest ladies of 
Northern nobilities were spoiling and praising him, as women 
had done from the day of his debut. Correze felt that he ought 
to have been content; he was seated luxuriously in one of the 
straw, hive-like chairs, a lovely Prussian Furstinn had lent him 
her huge fan, a Dutchwoman, handsome as Helen Mather, was 
making him a cigarette, and a Danish ambassadress was reading 
him a poem of Francois Coppee; the sea was rolling in in big bil- 
lows, and sending into the air a delicious crisp freshness and 
buoyancy; all along the flat and yellow dunes were pleasant peo- 
ple, clever people, handsome people, distinguished people. 

He ought to have been content, but he was not. He was 
thinking of green, cool, dusky, fir-scented Ischl. 

The Danish beauty stopped suddenly in her reading. You 
are not listening, Correze I” she cried aloud, in some dismay and 
discomfiture. 

“Madame,” said Correze, gallantly, “Coppee is a charming 
poet, but I would defy any one to think of what he writes when 
it is you who are the reader of it.” 

“That is very pretty,” said the lovely Dane; “ it would be per- 
fect, indeed, only one sees that you suppress a yawn as you say 
it!” 


“I never yawned, or -wished to yawn, in my life,” said he, 
promptly. “I cannot understand people who do. Cut your 
throat, blow out your brains, drown yourself, any one of these— 
that is a conceivable impulse; but yawn! what a confession of 


250 


MOTHS. 


internal nothingness! What a vapid and vacant wind-bag must 
be the man who collapses into a yawn!” 

“ Nevertheless you were very near one then,” said the Danish 
beauty, casting her Coppee aside on the sand. “Compliments 
aside, you are changed, do you know? You are serious, you are 
preoccupied.” 

At that moment his secretary brought him his letters. His 
ladies gave him permission to glance at them, for some were 
marked “urgent.” Among them was the letter of Madame de 
Sonnaz. 

He read it with surprise and some anger. It was a temptation; 
and the writer had known very well that it was so. 

He would not have touched the roubles of the master of Svir, 
and would not willingly even have broken his bread, yet he 
would have given everything he possessed to go, to be under the 
same roof with the wife jf Zouroff, to see, to hear, to charm, to 
influence her, to sing his songs for her ear alone. 

The rough gray northern ocean came booming over the sands. 
Correze sat silent and with a shadow on his face. 

Then he rose, wrote a line in a leaf of his note-book, and gave 
it to his secretary to have telegraphed at once to Isehl. The 
line said merely — 

“Mille remerciments. Tres-honore. Impossible d’accepter, a 
cause d’engagements. Tous mes hommages.” 

The sea rolled in with a grand sound, like a chant on a great 
drgan. 

“ It is very bourgeois to do right,” thought Correze, “ but one 
must do it sometimes. Madame Jeanne is too quick: she plays 
her cards coarsely. All those Second-Empire women are con- 
spirators, but they conspire too hurriedly to succeed. My beauti- 
ful edelweiss, do they think I should pluck you from your 
heights? Oh, the Goths! Madame,” he said, aloud, “ do be 
merciful, and read me the harmonies of Coppee again. You will 
not? That is revengeful. Perhaps I did not attend enough to 
his charming verses. There is another verse running in my 
head. Do you know it? I think Sully-Prudhomme wrote it. It 
is one of those things so true that they hurt one, and one carries 
the burden of them about like a sad memory: 

4t Dans les verres epais du cabaret brutal, 

Le vin bleu coule a flots, et sans treve a la ronde. 

Dans le calice fin plus rarement abonde 
Un vin dont la clarte soit digne du cristal. 

il Knfln, la coupe d’or du haut d’un piedestal * 

Attend, vide tou jours, bien que large et profonde, 

11 n cru dont la noblesse a la sienne reponde: 

On tremble d’en souiller l’ouvrage et le metal.” 

“Have your letters made you think of that poem?” asked his 
companion. 

“ Yes.” 

“ And where is the golden cup?” 

4 ‘ At the banquet of a debauchee who prefers 

‘Les verres epais du cabaret brutal. ’ ” 


MOTHS . IT m 


CHAPTER XXIL 

A few weeks later they were at Svir. 

Svir was one of the grandest summer palaces of the many pal- 
aces of the Princes Zoaroff. It had been built by a French arch- 
itect in the time of the great Catherine’s love of French art, and 
its appanages were less an estate than a province or principality 
that stretched far away to the horizon on every side save one, 
where the Baltic spread its ice-plains in the winter, and its blue 
waters _ to the brief summer sunshine. It was a very grand 
place; it had acres of palm-houses and glass-houses; it had vast 
stables full of horses; it had a theater, with a stage as large as 
the Folies Marigny’s; it had vast forests in which the bear and 
the boar and the wolf were hunted with the splendor and bar- 
barity of the royal hunts that Snyders painted; it was a Musco- 
vite Versailles, with hundreds of halls and chambers, and a 
staircase up which fifty men might have walked abreast; it had 
many treasures, too, of the arts, and precious marbles, Greek 
and Roman: yet there was no place on earth which Vere hated 
as she hated Svir. 

To her it was a symbol of despotism, of brutal power, of soul- 
less magnificence; and the cruelties of the sport that filled all 
the days, and the oppression of the peasantry by the elders and 
patriarchs which she was impotent to redress, weighed on her 
with continual pain. She had been taught in her girlhood to 
think; she knew too much to accept the surface gloss of things 
as their truth; she could not be content with a life which was a 
perpetual pageantry without any other aim than that of killing 
time. 

So much did the life at Svir displease her, and so indifferent 
was she to her own position in it, that she never observed that 
she was less mistress of it than was the Duchesse de Sonnaz, 
who was there with the Due Paul, a placid, sweet-tempered man, 
who was devoted to entomology and other harmless sciences. 
It was not Vere, but Madame Jeanne, who directed the amuse- 
ments of each day and night. It was Madame Jeanne who 
scolded the manager of the operetta troupe, who selected the 
pieces to be performed in the theater, who organized the hunt- 
ing-parties and the cotillons, and the sailing, and the riding. It 
was Madame Jeanne who, with her pistols in her belt, and her 
gold tipped ivory hunting-horn, and her green tunic and trousers, 
and her general franc-tireur aspect, went out with Sergius Zou- 
roff to see the bear’s death-struggle, and give the last stroke in 
the wolf’s throat. 

Vere — to whom the moonlit curee in the great court was a hor- 
rible sight, and who, though she had never blenched when the 
wolves had bayed after the sledge, would have turned sick and 
blind at sight of the dying beasts with the hunters’ knives in their 
necks — was only glad that there was any one who should take 
the task off their hands of amusing the large house-party and the 
morose humors of her husband. The words of Correze had failed 
59 awaken any suspicion in her mind* 


MOTHS : 


1052 

That the presence of Madame de Sonnaz at Svir was as great 
an insult to her as that of Noisette in the Kermesse pavilion never 
entered her thoughts. She only as yet knew very imperfectly 
her world. 

“ It is well she is beautiful, for she is only a bit of still life,” 
said Prince Zouroff, very contemptuously, to some one who com- 
plimented him upon his wife’s loveliness. 

When she received their Imperial guests ,?at the foot of her 
staircase, with a great bouquet of lilies of the valley and orchids 
in her hand, she was a perfectly beautiful picture against the 
ebony and malachite of the balustrade; that he granted; but she 
might as well have been made of marble for aught of interest or 
animation that she showed. 

It angered him bitterly that the luxury and extravagance with 
which she was surrounded did not impress her more. It was so 
very difficult to hurt a woman who cared for so little; her indif- 
ference seemed to remove her thousands of leagues away from 
him. 

“You see it is of no use to be angry with her,” he said to 
his confidante, Madame Jeanne. “ You do not move her. 
She remains tranquil. She does not oppose you, but neither 
does she alter. She is like the snow, that is so white and still 
and soft; but the snow is stronger than you: it will not stop for 
you.” 

Madame Jeanne laughed a little. 

“ My poor Sergius! you would marry!” 
r Zouroff was silent; his eyebrows were drawn together in moody 
meditation. 

Why had he married? he wondered. Because a child’s coldness 
and a child’s rudeness had made her loveliness greater for a mo- 
ment in his sight than any other. Because, also, for Vere, base 
as his passion had been, it had been more nearly redeemed by 
tenderness than anything he had ever-known. 

“ The snow is very still, it is true,” said Madame Jeanne, mus- 
ingly, “ but it can rise in a very wild tourmente sometimes. You 
must have seen that a thousand times.” 

“ And you mean ?” said Zouroff, turning his eyes on her, 

“ I meant that I think our sweet Vera is just the person to 
' have a coup de tete. and to forget everything in it.” 

‘ “ She will never forget what is due to me,” said Zouroff, angrily 

and roughly. 

Madame de Sonnaz laughed. 

“ Do you fancy she cares about that? What she does think of 
is what is due to herself. I always told you she is the type of 
woman that one never sees now — the woman who is chaste out 
of self-respect. It is admirable, it is exquisite, but all the same 
it is invulnerable; because it is only a finer sort of egotism.” 

“ She will never forget her duty,” said her husband, peremp- 
torily, as though, closing the discussion. 

“ Certainly not,” assented his friend; “not as long as it ap- 
pears duty to her. But her ideas of duty may change; who can 
say? And, mon cher, you do not very often remember yours to 
her!” 


'MOTHS. 


258 


Zouroff blazed into a sullen passion, at which Madame de Son- 
aaz laughed, as was her wont, and turned her back on him, and 
lighted a cigar. 

“After all,” she said, “ what silly words we usel Duty!— 
honor! — obligation! ‘ Tout cela est si purement geographique ,’ as 
was said at Marly long ago. I read the other day of Albania, in 
which it is duty to kill forty men for one, and of another country 
in which it i3 duty for a widow to marry all her brothers-in-law. 
Let us hope our Vera’s views of geography will never change.” 

They were standing together in one of the long alleys of the 
forest, which was resounding with the baying of hounds and the 
shouting of beaters. For all reply Sergius Zouroff put his rifle 
to his shoulder; a bear was being driven down the drive. 

“A moir cried Madame Jeanne. The great brown mass came 
thundering through the brushwood, and came into their sight; 
she raised her gun, and sent a bullet through its forehead, and 
snatched Zouroff’a breech-loader from him, and fired again. The 
bear dropped; there was a quick convulsive movement of all its 
paws, then it was still forever. 

“ I wish I could have married you !” cried Zouroff, enthusiast- 
ically. “ There is not another women in Europe who could have 
done that at such a distance as we are I” 

“ Mon vieux , we should have loathed each other,” said Madame 
Jeanne, in no way touched by the compliment. “ In a conjugal 
capacity I much prefer my good Paul.” 

Zouroff laughed — restored to good humor — and drew his hunt- 
ing-knife to give the customary stroke for surety to her victim. 
The day was beautiful in the deep green gloom and balmy soli- 
tude of the forest, which was chiefly of pines. 

“ Sport is very stupid,” said Madame Jeanne, blowing her ivory 
horn to call the keepers. “ Vera is employing her time much bet- 
ter, I am sure ; she is reading metaphysics, or looking at her or- 
chids, or studying Nihilism.” 

“ Let me forget for a moment that Vera exists,” said her hus- 
band, with his steel in the bear’s throat. 

Vere was studying Nihilism, or what has led to it, which comes 
to the same thing. 

The only town near Svir was one of great importance, a few 
miles inland, whose citizens were chiefly timber-traders, or own- 
ers of trading-ships, that went to and from the Baltic. It had 
some churches, some schools, some war of sects, and it had of 
late been in evil odor with the government for suspected socialist 
doctrines. It had been warned, punished, purified, but of late 
was supposed to have sinned again, and the hand of the Third 
Section had fallen heavily upon it. 

Vere this day rode over to it to visit one of its hospitals; her 
mother and other ladies drove there to purchase sables and 
marten skins. 

Lady Dolly had been so near — at Carlsbad, a mere trifle of a 
few hundred miles — that she had been unable to resist the temp- 
tation of running over for a peep at Svir, which she was dying 
to see, so she averred. She was as pretty as ever. She had 
changed the color of her curls, but that prevents monotony of 


MOTHS. 


m 


expression, and if well done is always admired. She had to be 
a little more careful always to have her back to the light, and 
there were sometimes about her eyes lines which nothing wouia 
quite paint away, and her maid found her more pettish and 
peevish. That was all. Twenty years hence, if Lady Dolly live, 
there will be hardly more difference than that. 

Her Sicilian had been also on the banks of the Teple — only for 
his health, for he was not strong; but he had not been too as- 
siduous in carrying her shawls, in ordering her dinners, in walk- 
ing beside her mule in the fir woods, and people began to talk; and 
Lady Dolly did not choose to imperil all that the flowers for the 
Children’s Hospital, and the early services at Knightsbridge, had 
done for her, so she had summarily left the young man in the fir 
woods, and come to Svir. 

“ I always like to witness my dear child’s happiness, you know, 
with my own eyes when I can; and in London and Paris both she 
and I are so terribly busy,” she said to her friends at Carlsbad. 

Harself, she always recoiled from meeting the grave eyes of 
Vere, and the smile of her son-in-law was occasionally grim and 
disagreeable and made her shiver; but yet she thought it well to 
go to their houses, and she was really anxious to see the glories 
of Svir. 

When she arrived there, she was enraptured. She adored 
novelty, and new things are hard to find for a person who has 
seen so much as she has. The Russian life was, in a measure, 
different from what she had known elsewhere, the local color en- 
chanted her, and the obeisances and humility of the people she 
declared was quite scriptural. 

The grandeur, the vastness, the absolute dominion, the half- 
barbaric magnificence that prevailed in this, the grandest sum- 
mer palace of the Zouroffs, delighted her; they appealed forcibly 
to her imagination, which had its vulgar side. They appeased 
her conscience too; for, after all, she thought, what could Yere 
wish for more? Short of royalty, no alliance could have given 
her more wealth, more authority, and more rank. 

These Baltic estates were a kingdom in themselves, and the 
prodigal, careless, endless luxury, that was the note of life 
there, was mingled with a despotism and a cynicism in all do- 
mestic relations that fascinated Lady Dolly. 

“ I should have been perfectly happy if I had married a great 
Russian,” she often said to herself; and she thought that her 
daughter was both thankless to her fate and to her Lady Dolly 
really began to bring herself to think so. 

“ Very few women,” she mused, “;would ever have effaced them- 
selves as I did, very few would have put away every personal 
feeling and objection as I did. Of course she doesn’t know; but 
I don’t believe any woman living would have done as I did, be- 
cause people are so selfish.” 

She had persuaded herself in all this time that she had been 
generous, self-sacrificing, even courageous, in marrying her 
daughter as she did ; and when now and then a qualm passed 
ever her, as she thought that the world might give all these great 
qualities very different and darker names, "Lady Dolly took a lit* 


MOTHS . S5* 

tie sherry or a little chloral, according to the time of day, and 
very soon was herself again. 

To be able to do no wrong at ail in one’s own sight, is one of 
the secrets of personal comfort in this life. Lady Dolly never 
admitted, even to herself, that she did any. If anything looked 
a little wrong, it was only because she was the victim to unkind- 
ly circumstance over which she had no control. 

People had always been so jealous of her, and_so nasty to her 
about money. 

It is all very well to talk about the saints,” she would say to 
herself, “ but they never had any real trials. If the apostles had 
had bills due that they couldn’t meet, or Saint Helen and Saint 
Ursula had had their curls come off just as they were being 
taken in to dinner, they might have talked. As it wa^. -am 
sure they enjoyed all their martyrdom, just as people scream 
about being libeled in ‘ Truth ’ or ‘ Figaro,’ and delight in hav- 
ing their names in them. 

Lady Dolly always thought herself an ill-used woman. If 
things had been in the least just, she would have been born with 
thirty thousand a year and six inches more stature. 

Meanwhile, she was even prettier than ever. She had under- 
gone a slight transformation; her curls were of a richer, ruddier 
hue, her eyelashes were darker and thicker, her mouth was a lit- 
tle pomegranate bud. It was all Piver; but it was the very per- 
fection of Piver. She had considered that the hues and style of 
the fashions of the coming year, which were always disclosed to 
her very early in secret conclave in the Rue de la Paix, required 
this slight deepening and heightening of her complexion. 

“ I do wish you would induce Vera to rouge a little, just a lit- 
tle. Dress this win ter really will want it: the colors will all be 
dead ones,” she had said this day at Svir to her son-in-law, who 
shrugged his shoulders. 

“ I have told her she would look better; but she is obstinate, 
you know.” 

“Oh-h-h!” assented Lady Dolly. “Obstinate is no word for 
it; she k mulish , of course; I understand. She is very proud of 
her skin, but it would look all the better if it were warmed up a 
little; it is too white, too fair, if one can say such a thing, don’t 
you know? And, besides, even though she may look well row 
without it, a woman who never rouges has a frightful middle- 
age before her. Didn’t Talleyrand say so?” 

“You are thinking of whist; but the meaning is che same« 
Both are resources for autumn that are better to take to in 
summer,” said Madame Nelaguine, with her little cynical 
smile. 

“ Vere is very fantastic,” said the Duchesse Jeanne. “ Besides, 
she is so handsome she is not afraid of growing older: she thinks 
she will defy Time.” 

“I believe you can if you are well enameled,” said Lady 
Dolly, seriously. 

“Vera will be like the woman under „he Merovingian kings,” 
Said Madame Nelaguine — “ tb« woman who went every dawn o i 


MOTHS 


m 

As her breast heaved quicker with the memory, the ever-trem 
bling moth of the medallion rose and touched the star. 

“An allegory, or a talisman?’ said one of the Imperial guests, 
who sat on her right hand, looking at the jewel. 

* f Both, sir ” answered Vere. 

Later in the evening, when, after seeing a Proverbe exquisitely 
acted, the princes were for the present hour absorbed in the 
card-room, Madame Nelaguine lingered for a moment by he! 
sister-in-law. Vera had gone for an instant on to the terrace, 
which overlooked the sea, as did the terrace of Felicite* 

“ Are you well to-day, my Vera?” 

“ As well as usual.” 

** I think Ischl did you little good,” 

“ Ischl? What should Ischl do for me? The Traun is no Lethe/ 

“Will you never be content, never be resigned?” 

“ I think not,” said Vere, very quietly. 

Madame Nelaguine sighed. 

She had never been a good woman, nor a true one, in hei 
world ; but in her affection for her brother’s wife she was sincere# 

“Tell me,'’ said Vere, abruptly, "tell me — you are his sister, 1 
may say so to you — tell me, it does not make a woman’s duty 
less, that her husband forgets his?” 

: ‘No, dear — at least — no — I suppose not. No, of course not/ 
said Madame Nelaguine, . She had been a very faithless wife 
herself, but of that Vere knew nothing. 

“It does not change one’s own obligation to him,” said Vere, 
Wearily, with a feverish flush coming over her face. “ No; that 
I feel. What one promised, one must abide by; that is quite 
certain. Whatever he does, one must not make that any excuse 
to leave him?” 

She turned her clear and noble eyes full upon his sister’s, 
and the eyes of Madame Nelaguine shunned the gaze and fell, 

“ My dear,” she said, evasively, “no, no; no wife must leave 
her husband; most certainly not. She must bear everything 
without avenging any insult, because the world is always ready 
to condemn the woman: it hardly ever will condemn the man, 
And a wife, however innocent, however deeply to be pitied, is 
always in a false position when she quits her husband’s house. 
She is declassee at once. However much other women feel for 
her, they will seldom receive her. Her place in the world is 
gone, and when she is young., above all, to break up her married 
life is social ruin. Pray, pray do not ever think of that. Ser* 
gius has grave faults, terrible faults, to you; but do not attempt 
to redress them yourself. You would only lose caste, lose 
sympathy- lose rank, at once. Pray, pray do not think of 
that.” 

Vere withdrew her hand from her sister-in-law’s; a shadow of 
disappointment came on her face, and then altered to a sad dis- 
dain. 

“I was not thinking of what I should lose,” she said, recover- 
ing her tranquillity. “ That would not weigh with me for a 
moment. I was thinking of what is right; of what a wife should 
be before God.” 


MOTHS, 


“You are sublime, my dear,” said the Russian princess, a little 
irritably because her own consciousness of her own past smote 
her and smarted. “ You are sublime. But you are many octaves 
higher than our concert pitch. No one now ever thinks in the 
sort of way that you do. You would have been a wife for Mil- 
ton. My brother is, alas! quite incapable of appreciating all 
that devotion.” 

“His power of appreciation is not the measure of my con- 
duct,” said Vere, with a contempt that would have been bitter 
had it not been so weary. 

“ That is happy for him,” said his sister, dryly. “ But, in sad 
and sober truth, my Vera, your ideas are too high for the world 
we live in; you are a saint raising an oriflamme above a holy 
strife; and we are only a rabble of common maskers— who 
laugh.” 

“ You can laugh.” 

“ I do not laugh, Heaven knows,” said her sister-in-law, with 
a glisten of water in her shrewd, bright eyes, that could not bear 
the candid gaze of Vere. “Ido not laugh. I understand you. 
If I never could have been like you, I revere you — yes. But it is 
of no use, my dear, no use, alas! to bring these true and high 
emotions into common life. They are too exalted; they are fit 
for higher air. Roughly and coarsely if you will, but truly, I 
will tell you there is nothing of nobility, nothing of duty, in 
marriage, as our world sees it; it is simply a convenience, a 
somewhat clumsy contrivance to tide over a social difficulty. Do 
not think of it as anything else; if you do, one day disgust will 
seize you, your high and holy faiths will snap and break, and 
then ” 

“And then?” 

“ Then you will be of all women most unhappy; fori think 
you could not endure your life if you despised yourself.” 

“I have endured it,” said Vere, in a low voice. “ You think I 
have not despised myself every day, every night?” 

“ Not as I mean. The wrong has been done to you. You have 
done none. All the difference lies there — ah, such a difference, 
my dear! The difference between the glacier and the mud- 
torrent!” 

Vere was silent. Then, with a shiver, she drew her wraps 
about her as the cold wind came over the sea. 

“ Shall we go in the house? It is chilly here,” she said to her 
sister-in-law. 


CHAPTER XXin. 

The two shooting-months passed at Svir — brilliantly to all the 
guests, tediously and bitterly to the mistress of the place. Lady 
Dolly had early vanished to see the fair of Nijni Novgorod with 
a pleasant party, and Count Rostrow for their guide, and had 
vague thoughts of going down the river and seeing the spurs of 
the Caucasus, and meeting her husband in St. Petersburg, 
where, so enraptured was she with the country, she almost 
thought she would persuade him to live. Due Paul and Duchess© 


258 


IJOTHS 


suspected of revolutionary conspiracies, had harbored suspected 
persons, or were suspected themselves — Nihilists, in a word. 

“ How very interesting !” said Lady Dolly again. “Now, one 
would never see such a sight as that in England, Lord Bangor ?” 
“No,” said Lord Bangor, seriously; “ I don’t think we should. 

There are defects in our constitution ” 

“ Poor things !” said Lady Dolly, a pretty figure in feuillemorte 
and violet, with a jeweled ebony cane as high as her shoulder, 
surveying through her glass the chained, dusty, heart-sick 
prisoners. “But why couldn’t they keep quiet? So stupid of 
them! I never understand those revolutionaries; they upset 
everything, and bore everybody, and think themselves martyrs i 
It will be such a pity if you do get those horrid principles here. 
Russia is too charming as it is — everybody so obedient and nice 
as they are at present; everybody kneeling and bowing and doing 
what they’re told; not like us with our horrid servants, who take 
themselves off the very day of a big party, or say they won't 
stay if they haven’t pineapples. I think the whole social system 
of Russia perfect — quite perfect; only it must have been" nicer 
still before the Tsar was too kind, and let loose all those serfs, 
who, I am quite sure, haven’t an idea what to do with them* 
selves, and will be sure to shoot him for it some day.” 

Lady Dolly paused in these discursive political utterances, and 
looked again at the little band of fettered youths and maidens, 
dusty, pale, jaded, who were being hustled along by the Cossacks 
through the silent scattered groups of the people. A local 
official had been wounded by a shot from a revolver, and they 
were all implicated, or the police wished to suppose them to be 
implicated, in the offense. They were being carried away be- 

J rond the Ourals; their parents, and brothers and sisters, and 
overs knew very well that never more would their young feet 
tread the stones of their native town. A silence like that of the 
grave — which would perhaps be the silence of the grave — would 
soon engulf and close over them. Henceforth they would be 
mere memories to those who loved them: no more. 

“They look very harmless,” said Lady Dolly, disappointed that 
conspirators did not look a little as they do on the stage. 
“ Really, you know, if it wasn’t for these handcuffs, one might 
take them for a set of excursionists, really, now, mightn’t we t 

Just that sort of jaded, dusty, uncomfortable look ” 

“ Consequent on 1 three shillings to Margate and back Yes; 
they have a Bank holiday look,” said Lord Bangor. ‘ But it will 
be a long Bank holiday for them: they are on their first stage to 
Siberia.” 

“ How interesting!” said Lady Dolly. 

At that moment an old white-haired woman, with a piercing 
cry, broke through the ranks, and fell on the neck of a young 
man, clinging to him for all that the police could do till the 
lances of the Cossacks parted the mother and son. 

“It is a sad state of things for any country,” said Lord Ban- 
gor; and the young captain of the Guard laughed. 

“Well, why couldn’t they keep quiet!” said Lady Dolly. 
u Dear i»e! with all thi^-Crowd, how ever shall we find the car- 


MOTHS. 


259 


riage? “Where is “Vere, I wonder? But she said we need not wait 
for her. Don’t you think we had better go home? I shouldn’t 
like to meet wolves.” 

“ Wolves are not hungry in summer,” said Lord Bangor “ It 
is only the prison’s maw that is never full.” 

Well, what are they to do if people won’t keep quiet?” said 
Lady Dolly. ‘ ‘I’m sure those young men and women do net 
look like geniuses that would be able to set the world on fire, I t 
suppose they are work-people, most of them. They will do very * 
well, I dare say, in Tomsk. Count Rostrow, here, tells me the 
exiles are beautifully treated, and quite happy, and all that is 
said about the quicksilver mines is all exaggeration— newspaper 
nonsense.” 

“ No doubt,” said Lord Bangor. “ To object to exile is a mere 
bad form of Chauvinism.” 

“ Why couldn’t they keep quiet if they don’t like to go there?” 
she said again, and got into the carriage, and drove away out 
into the road over the plain, between the great green sea of 
billowy grasses and the golden ocean of ripened grain, and, in 
time, bowled through the golden gates of Svir, and ate her dinner 
with a good appetite, and laughed till she cried at the drolleries 
of a new operetta of Meta’s, which the French actors gave in the 
little opera-house. 

‘•Life is so full of contrasts in Russia; it is quite delightful; 
one can’t be dull,” she said to Lord Bangor, who sat beside her. 

“Life is full of contrasts everywhere, my dear lady,” said he. 
“Only, as a rule, we never look on the other side of the wall. It 
bores us even to remember that there is another side,” 

Vere that night was paler and stiller even than it was her wont 
to be. She went about among her guests with that grace a od 
courtesy which never changed, but she was absent in mind; and 
once or twice, as the laughter of the audience rippled in echo to 
the gay melodies of Meta, a shiver as of cold went over her. 

“She must have heard something about Correze that has 
embarrassed her,” thought Madame de Sonnaz; but she was 
wrong. 

Vere had only seen the same sight that her mother had seen, in 
the little town of Molv. 

That night, when the house-party had broken up to :;o to their 
apartments, and she had gained the comparative pe ,.e of her 
own chamber, Vere, when her maids had passed a Icglc white ' 
gown over her and unloosened her hair, sent them away, and 
went into the little oratory that adjoined her dressing-room. She 
kneeled down, and leaned her arms on the rail of the little altar, 
and her head on her arms; but she could not pray. Life seemed 
to her too terrible; and who cared? who cared? 

Riches had done their best to embellish the little sanctuary; the 
walls were inlaid with malachite and marbles; the crucifix was a 
wonderful work in ivory and silver; the j priedieu was embroid- 
ered in silks and precious stones; there was a triptych of Lucas 
von Cranach, and Oriental candelabra in gold. It was a retreat 
that had been sacred to the dead Princess /Maria, her husband’s 
mother, a pious and melancholv woman. 


260 


MOTHS. 


Vere cared little for any of these things; but the place was 
really to her a sanctuary, as no one ever disturbed her there; 
even Zouroff never had presumed to enter it; and the painted 
casements, when they were opened, showed her the green plain, 
and, beyond the plain, the beautiful waters of the Baltic. Here 
she could be tranquil now and then, and try and give her 
thoughts to her old friends, the Latin writers, or read the verse 
of George Herbert, or the prose of Thomas a Kempis, and pray 
for force to bear the life she led. 

But to-night she could not pray. 

She was one of those who are less strong for the woes of 
others than for their own. 

She leaned her face upon her arms, and only wondered — won- 
dered — wondered — why men were so cruel, and God so deaf. 

It was nearly two in the morning; through the painted panes 
the stars were shining; beyond the plain there was the silver of 
the dawn. 

Suddenly a heavy step trod on the marbles of the pavement. 
For the first time since their marriage, her husband entered the 

E lace of prayer. She turned, and half rose in astonishment, and 
er heart grew sick; she was not safe from him even here. He 
marked the instinct of aversion, and hated her for it: the time 
was gone by when it allured and enchained him. 

“ Excuse me for my entrance here,” he said, with that courtesy 
to which the presence of his wife always compelled him, despite 
himself. “I am exceedingly annoyed, compromised, disgusted. 
You were in Molv to-day?” 

“Yes; I rode there. I went to see your mother’s hospital.” 
She had quite risen, and stood, with one hand on the altar rail, 
looking at him. 

“I hear that you saw those prisoners; that you spoke to them; 
that you made a scene, a scandal; that you gave one of the 
women your handkerchief; that you promised them all kinds of 
impossible follies. Be so good as to tell me what happened.” 

“ Who spies upon me?” said Vera, with the color rising to her 
face. 

“ Spies! No one. If you choose to exhibit yourself in a pub- 
lic street, a hundred people may well see you. What did hap- 
pen? Answer me.” 

“This happened. I met the prisoners. I do not believe any 
of them are guilty of the attempt to assassinate General Marco- 
loff. They are all very young, several were girls; one of the 
girls broke from the guards, and threw herself before me, sob- 
bing and begging my help. Her arm was cut and bleeding, I 
suppose in fastening the chains; I took my handkerchief and 
bound it up; I promised her to support her mother, who is old 
and infirm. I spoke to them all and bade them try and bear 
their fate calmly. I wept with them, that I confess; but I was 
not alone: there were not many dry eyes in Molv. I believe all 
these young people to be quite innocent. I believe if the Em- 
peror saw the things that are done in his name, he would not 
sanction them. That is all I have to tell you. It has haunted 
mo all the evening. It is horrible that such tyrannies should be* 


MOTHS. 


281 


and that we should dine, and laugh, and spend thousands of 
roubles in a night, and live s if no living creatures were being 
tortured near us. I cannot forget it; and I will do what I can to 
serve them.” 

She had never spoken at such length to her husband in all the 
three years of her married life; but she felt strongly, and it 
seemed to her that here reticence would have been cowardice. 
She spoke quite tranquilly, but her voice had a depth in it that 
told how keenly she had been moved., 

Zouroff heard her with a scowl upon his brows; then he laugh- 
ed contemptuously and angrily. 

“ You believe!” he echoed. “ What should you know, and 
why should you care? Will you learn to leave those things 
alone? A Princess Zouroff dismounting in the dust to bind up 
the wounds of a Nihilist convict? What a touching spectacle! 
But we will have no more of these scenes, if you please; they 
are very unbecoming, and, more, they are very compromising. 
The Emperor knows me well, indeed, but enemies might carry 
such a tale to him; and he might see fit to suspect, to order me 
not to leave Russia, to imprison me on my estates. It is as like- 
ly as not that your theatrical vagaries may get bruited about at 
court. I neither know nor care whether these creatures shot 
Marcoloff or abetted shooting at him; what I do care for is the 
dignity of my name.” 

Vere, standing beside the great ivory crucifix, with the loose 
white draperies falling about her, and her fair hair unbound and 
fa llin g over her shoulders, turned her face more fully upon him. 
There was a faint smile upon her lips. 

“ The dignity of your name!” she said, merely; and the accent 
said the rest. 

The calm contempt pierced his vanity and self-love, and made 
him wince and smart. The first sign she had given that the un- 
worthiness of his life was known to her had been when she had 
ordered him to remove the pavilion of Noisette. He had always 
set her aside as a beautiful, blonde, ignorant, religious creature, 
and the shock was great to him to find in her a judge who cen- 
sured and scorned him. 

“The dignity of my name,” he repeated sullenly, and with 
greater insistance. “We were great nobles with Dolgorouki, 
when the Romanoffs were nothing. I do not choose for my 
name to be dragged in the dust because you are headstrong 
enough, or childish enough, to fancy some incendiaries or assas- 
sins are martyrs. Have politics, if you like, in Paris in your 
drawing-room, but leave them alone here. They are dangerous 
here, and worse than dangerous. They are low. I deny you 
nothing else. You have money at your pleasure, amusements, 
jewels, anything you like; but I forbid you political vulgarities. 
I was disgusted when I heard of the spectacle of this morning; I 
was ashamed ” 

“Is it not rather a matter for shame that we eat and drink; 
and laugh and talk, with all this frightful agony around us?” 
said Vere, with a vibration of rare passion in her voice. “The 
people may be wrong; they may be guilty; but their class have 


1 MOTHS* 


W2 

so much to avenge, and your class so muon to expiate, that theif 
offense cannot equal yours. You think I cannot understand 
these things? You are mistaken. There is suffering and injust- 
ice enough on your own lands of Svir alone to justify a revolu- 
tion. I know it; I see it; I suffer under it — suffer because I am 
powerless to remedy it, and I am supposed to be acquiescent in 
it. If you allowed me to interest myself in your country, I 
would try not to feel every hour in it an exile, and the emptiness 
and nothingness of my life would cease to oppress and to tor- 
ment me ” 

“ Silence 1” said Zouroff, with petulance. “You may come 
here for prayer, but I do not come here for sermons. The empti- 
ness of your life! What do you mean? You are young, and you 
are beautiful; and you have in me a husband who asks nothing 
of you except to look well and to spend money. Cannot you be 
happy? Think of your new cases from Worth’s, and let political 
agitators keep the monopoly of their incendiary rubbish. You 
have been the beauty of Paris and Petersburg for three years. 
That should satisfy any woman.” 

“ It merely insults me,” she answered him. “ Society comes 
and stares. So it stares at the actress Noisette; so it stares at 
that nameless woman whom you call Casse-une-Croute. Is that 
a thing to be proud of? You may be so; I am not. Men make 
me compliments, or try to make them, that I esteem no better 
than insults. Your own friends are foremost; they talk of my 
portraits, of my busts, of my jewels, of my dresses. Another 
year it will be some one else that they will talk about, and they 
will cease to look at me. They find me cold, they find me stupid. 
I am glad that they do* if they did otherwise, I should have lived 
to despise myself.” 

“iVora de Dieu /” muttered Zouroff; and he stared at her, 
wondering if she had said the names of Noisette and Casse* 
une-Croute by hazard, or if she knew? He began to think 
she knew. He had always thought her blind as a statue, ig- 
norant as a nun; but, as she stood before him, for the firsft 
time letting loose the disdain and the weariness that consumed 
her heart into words, he began slowly to perceive that, though 
he had wedded a child, she was a child no longer; he began to 
perceive that, after three years in the great world, his wife had 
grown to womanhood with all that knowledge which the great 
world alone can give. 

As she had said nothing to him, after the Kermesse, of the ab- 
sence of Noisette, he had fancied her anger a mere boutade , due, 
perhaps, to pride, which he knew was very strong in her. Now 
he saw that his wife’s silence had arisen not from ignorance, but 
from submission to what she conceived to be her duty, or per- 
haps, more likely still, from scorn — a scorn too profound and too 
cold to stoop to reproach or to reproof. 

“ Why cannot you be like any other woman?” he muttered. 
tf Why cannot you content yourself with your chiffons, your con- 
quests, your beauty? If you were an ugly woman one could un- 
derstand your taking refuge in religion and politics; but, at your 


MOTHS. 268 

fge, with your face and figure! Good heavens! it is too ridicu- 
lous!” 

The eyes of Yere grew very stern. 

“ That is your advice to me? to content myself with my chiffons 
and my conquests?” 

“Certainly; any other woman would. I know you are to be 
trusted; you will never let men go too far.” 

“If I dragged your name in the dust throughout Europe you 
would deserve it,” thought his wife; and a bitter retort rose to 
her lips. But she had been reared in other ways than mere obe- 
dience to every impulse of act or speech. She still believed, de- 
spite the world about her, that the word she had given in her 
marriage-vow required her forbearance and her subjection to 
Sergius Zouroff ; she was still of the “ old fashion.” 

She controlled her anger and her disdain, and turned her face 
full on him with something pleading and wistful in the proud 
eyes that had still the darkness of just scorn. 

“ You prefer the society of Noisette and Casse-une-Croute; 
why do you need mine too? Since they amuse you, and can con- 
tent you, cannot you let me be free of all this gilded bondage, 
which is but a shade better than their gilded infamy? You bid 
me occupy myself with chiffons and conquests. I care for 
neither. Will you give me what I could care for? This feverish,, 
frivolous life of the great world has nq charm for me. It suits 
me in nothing; neither in health nor taste, neither in mind nor 
body. I abhor it. I was reared in other ways with other 
thoughts. It is horrible to me to waste the year from one end to 
the other on mere display, mere dissipation; to call it amusement 
is absurd, for it amuses no one. It is a monotony, in its way, as 
tiresome as any other.” 

' T * : s +he life we all lead,” he interrupted her, with some im- 
patience. ‘'here :s intrigue enough in it to salt it, God knows!” 

‘ Not ror me,” said Vere, coldly, with an accent that made him 
feel ashamed. “You do not understand me — I suppose you 
never will ; but, to speak practically, will you let me pass my 
time on one of your estates ? if not here, in Poland, where the 
people suffer more, and where I might do good ? I have more 
strength of purpose than you fancy : I would educate the peas- 
ant children, and try and make your name beloved and honored 
on your lands— not cursed, as it is now. Let me live that sort 
of life, for half the year at least ; let me feel that all the time 
God gives me is not utterly wasted. I helped many in Paris , I 
could do more, so much more, here. I would make your people 
love me ; and then perhaps, peace at least would come to me. I 
am most unhappy now. You must have known it always, but 1 
think you never cared.” 

The simplicity of the words, spoken as a child would have 
spoken them, had an intense pathos in them, uttered as they were 
by a woman scarcely twenty, who was supposed to have the 
world at her feet. For one moment they touched the cold heart 
of Zouroff, as once before at Felicite the uplifted eyes of Vere had 
touched them at their betrothal and ahnost spurred him to re- 
nunciation of her and refuse of her sacrifice!. And she looked sa 


204 


MOTHS \ 


voting, with her hair falling back over her shoulders, and behind 
her the wliite crucifix and the stars of the morning skies — and 
her child had died here at Svir. 

For the moment his face softened, and he was moved to a 
vague remorse and a vague pity; for a moment Noisette and 
Casse-une-Croute, and even Jeanne de Sonnaz, looked to him 
vulgar and common beside his wife; for a moment les verves 
epais du cabaret brutal seemed tainted by the many lips that 
used them, and this pure golden cup seemed worthy of a god. 
But the moment passed, and the long habits and humors of a 
loose and selfish life resumed their sway within him, and he only 
saw a lovely woman whom he had bought as he bought the 
others, only with a higher price. 

He took the loose gold of her hair in his hands with a sudden 
caress and drew her into his arms. 

44 Pardieu!” he said, with a short laugh. “A very calm prop- 
osition for a separation! That is what you drive at, no doubt; 
a separation in which you shall have all the honors as Princess 
Zouroff still! No, my lovely Vera, I am not disposed to gratify 
you so. You belong to me, and you must continue to belong to 
me, nilly-willy. You are too handsome to lose, and you should 
be grateful for your beauty: it made you mistress of Svir. Pshaw! 
how you shudder! You forget you must pay now and then for 
your diamonds.” 

There are many martyrdoms, as there are many prostitutions, 
that law legalizes and the churches approve. 

She never again prayed in her oratory. The ivory Christ had 
failed to protect her. 

All the month long there was the pressure of social obligations 
upon her, the hothouse atmosphere of a court about her, for 
Imperial guests followed on those who had left a few days 
earlier, and there could be no hour of freedom for the mistress 
of Svir. 

Her mother was radiantly content; Count Eostrow was charm- 
ing; and a grand duke found her still a pretty woman; play was 
high most nights; and the Sicilian was forgotten. All that 
troubled her was that her daughter never looked at her if she 
could help it, never spoke to her except on the commonplace 
^courtesies and trifles of the hour. Not that she cared, only she 
sometimes feared other people might notice it. 

These days seemed to Vere the very longest in all her life. 
Her apathy had changed into bitterness, her indifference was 
growing into despair. She thought, with unutterable scorn, ‘If 
the world would only allow it, he would have Casse-une-Croute 
here!” 

She was nothing more in her husband’s eyes than Casse-une- 
Croute was. 

All the pride of her temper and all the purity of her nature 
rose against him. As she wore his jewels, as she sat at his table, 
as she received his guests, as she answered to his name, all her 
soul was in revolt against him, such revolt as to the women of 
her world seemed the natural instinct of a woman toward her 
husband, a thing to be indulged in w^ hout scruple or stint, but 


MOTHS 265 

which to her, in whom were all the old faiths and purities of a 
forgotten creed, seemed a sin. 

A sin! Did the world know of such a thing? Hardly. Now 
and then, for sake of its traditions, the world took some hapless 
hoy, or some still yet unhappier woman, and pilloried one of 
them, and drove them out under a shower of stones, selecting 
them by caprice, persecuting them without justice, slaying them 
because they were friendless. But this was all. 

For the most part sin was an obsolete thing, archaic and un- 
heard of; public prints chronicled the sayings and the doings of 
Noisette and Casse-une-Croute ; society chirped and babbled mer- 
rily of all the filth that satirists scarce dare do more than hint at 
lest they fall under the law. There was no longer in her eyes the 
blindness of an innocent, unconscious youth. She saw corrup- 
tion all around her — a corruption so general, so insidious, so 
lightly judged, so popular, that it was nearly universal; and 
amidst it the few isolated souls that it could not taint and claim 
and absorb were lost as in a mist, and could not behold one an- 
other. 

A dull confusion weighed upon her brain. Her husband had 
counseled her to lose herself in chiffons and in conquests! 

It seemed to her as vile as when, in the old familiar story that 
childhood loves, the husband had let his wife ride naked through 
the streets of Coventry. She knew very well he would not care; 
nay, that he would perhaps like her the better. As he had often 
bidden her put red upon her cheeks, so he would have awakened 
to a quicker esteem of her if he had seen her leaving ball-rooms 
in the light of morning, with the ribbons of the cotillons on her 
breast, smiling on her lovers above the feathers of her fan, pro- 
voking with effrontery the gaze of men, answering every avowal 
with smiling reproof that meant forgiveness, and passing gayly 
through the masque of society with kohl around her eyes, and a 
jest upon her mouth, and hidden in her bosom or her bouquet 
some royal lover’s note. He would have esteemed her more high- 
ly so. Perhaps then she might even have stood higher in his eyes 
than Casse- une-Croute. 

She thought this as she sat in the evening at his table, with 
her Imperial guests beside her, and before her eyes the glow of 
the gold plate with the Zouroff crown upon it. She was as white 
as ivory; her eyes had a somber indignation in them; she wore 
her Order of St. Catherine and her necklace of the moth and the 
star. 

“ If one did not keep to honor, for honor’s sake,” she thought, 
“ what would he not make me— I should be viler than any one of 
them.” 

For, as she saw her husband’s face above that broad gleam of 
gold, the longing for one instant came over her, with deadly 
temptation, to take such vengeance as a wife can always take, 
and teach him what fruit his own teachings brought, and make 
him the byword and mock of Europe. 

The moment passed. 

“ He cannot make me vile,” she thought. “ No one can— save 
myself.” 


MOTHS 


m 

As her breast heaved quicker with the memory, the ever-trem 
bling moth of the medallion rose and touched the star. 

■ ■ An allegory, or a talisman?’ said one of the Imperial guests, 
who sat on her right hand, looking at the jewel. 

“Both, sir answered Vere. 

Later in the evening, when, after seeing a Proverbe exquisitely 
acted, the princes were for the present hour absorbed in the 
card-room, Madame Nelaguine lingered for a moment by het 
sister-in-law. Vera had gone for an instant on to the terrace, 
which overlooked the sea, as did the terrace of Felicite, 

“ Are you well to-day, my Vera?’' 

As well as usual.” 

*• I think Ischl did you little good,” 

“ Ischl? What should Ischl do for me? The Traun is no Lethe.” 

“'Will you never be content, never be resigned?” 

“ I think not,” said Vere, very quietly. 

Madame Nelaguine sighed. 

She had never been a good woman, nor a true one, in hei 
world; but in her affection for her brother’s wife she was sincere* 

’•Tell me,' 5 said Vere, abruptly, "tell me — you are his sister, 1 
may say so to you — tell me, it does not make a woman’s duty 
less, that her husband forgets his?” 

“No, dear — at least— no — 1 suppose not. No, of course not/ 
said Madame Nelaguine. . She had been a very faithless wife 
herself, but of that Vere knew nothing. 

“It does not change one’s own obligation to him,” said Vere, 
Wearily, with a feverish flush coming over her face, “ No; that 
I feel. What one promised, one must abide by; that is quite 
certain. Whatever he does, one must not make that any excuse 
to leave him?” 

She turned her clear and noble eyes full upon his sister’s, 
and the eyes of Madame Nelaguine shunned the gaze and fell. 

“My dear,” she said, evasively, “no, no; no wife must leave 
her husband; most certainly not. She must bear everything 
without avenging any insult, because the world is always ready 
to condemn the woman: it hardly ever will condemn the man, 
And a wife, however innocent, however deeply to be pitied, is 
always ip a false position when she quits her husband’s house. 
She is declassee at once. However much other women feel for 
her, they will seldom receive her. Her place in the world is 
gone, and when she is young, above all, to break up her married 
life is social ruin. Pray, pray do not ever think of that. Ser- 
gius has grave faults, terrible faults, to you; but do not attempt 
to redress them yourself. You would only lose caste, lose 
sympathy, lose rank, at once. Pray, pray do not think of 
that.” 

Vere withdrew her hand from her sister-in-law’s; a shadow of 
disappointment came on her face, and then altered to a sad dis- 
dain. 

“I was not thinking of what I should lose,” she said, recover- 
ing her tranquillity. “ That would not weigh with me for a 
moment. I was thinking of what is right; of what a wife should 
be before God.” 


IfTUTHS, 


m 


“You are Bublime, my dear,” said the Russian princess, a little 
Irritably because her own consciousness of her own past smote 
her and smarted. “ You are sublime. But you are many octaves 
higher than our concert pitch. No one now ever thinks in the 
sort of way that you do. You would have been a wife for Mil- 
ton. My brother is, alas! quite incapable of appreciating all 
that devotion.” 

“His i>o wer of appreciation is not the measure of my con- 
duct,” said Yere, with a contempt that would have been bitter 
had it not been so weary. 

“ That is happy for him,” said his sister, dryly. “ But, in sad 
and sober truth, my Vera, your ideas are too high for the world 
we live in; you are a saint raising an oriflamme above a holy 
strife; and we are only a rabble of common maskers — who 
laugh.” 

“You can laugh.” 

“ I do not laugh, Heaven knows,” said her sister-in-law, with 
a glisten of water in her shrewd, bright eyes, that could not bear 
the candid gaze of Yere. “Ido not laugh. I understand you. 
If I never could have been like you, I revere you — yes. But it is 
of no use, my dear, no use, alas! to bring these true and high 
emotions into common life. They are too exalted; they are fit 
for higher air. Roughly and coarsely if you will, but truly, I 
will tell you there is nothing of nobility, nothing of duty, in 
marriage, as our world sees it; it is simply a convenience, a 
somewhat clumsy contrivance to tide over a social difficulty. Do 
not think of it as anything else; if you do, one day disgust will 
seize you, your high and holy faiths will snap and break, and 
then ” 

“And then?” 

“ Then you will be of all women most unhappy; fori think 
you could not endure your life if you despised yourself.” 

“I have endured it,” said Vere, in a low voice. “ You think I 
have not despised myself every day, every night?” 

“ Not as I mean. The wrong has been done to you. You have 
done none. All the difference lies there — ah, such a difference, 
my dear! The difference between the glacier and the mud- 
torrent!” 

Yere was silent. Then, with a shiver, she drew her wraps 
about her as the cold wind came over the sea. 

“ Shall we go in the house? It is chilly here,” she said to her 
sister-in-law. 


CHAPTER XXin. 

The two shooting-months passed at Svir — brilliantly to all the 
guests, tediously and bitterly to the mistress of the place. Lady 
Dolly had early vanished to see the fair of Nijni Novgorod with 
a pleasant party, and Count Rostrow for their guide, and had 
vague thoughts of going down the river and seeing the spurs of 
the Caucasus, and meeting her husband in St. Petersburg, 
where, so enraptured was she with the country, she almost 
thought she would persuade him to live. Due Paul and Duchess© 


268 


MOTHS. 


Jeanne had gone ona round of visits to friends in Croatia, Cour- 
land, and Styria. Troops of guests in succession had arrived, 
stayed at, and departed from the great Zouroff palace on the 
Baltic; and, when the first snows were falling, Sergius Zouroff 
traveled back to his villa on the Riviera with no more prepara- 
tion or hesitation than he would have needed to drive from the 
Barriere de 1’Etoile to the Rue Helder. 

“What waste it is all!” thought his wife, as she looked at the , 
grand front of Svir, its magnificent forests and its exquisite 
gardens. For ten months out of the year Svir, like Felicite, was 
like a hundred thousand castles and palaces in Europe; it served 
only for the maintenance and pleasure of a disorderly and idle 
troop of hirelings, unjust stewards, and fattening thieves of all 
sorts. 

“ What would you do with it if you had your way?” asked 

Madame Nelaguine. 

She answered, “ I would live in it; or I would turn it into a 
Russian St.-Cvr.” 

“Always sublime, my love!” said Madame Nelaguine, with a 
touch of asperity and ridicule. 

The towers of Svir faded from Vere’s sight in the blue mista 
of evening; a few days and nights followed, and then the crock- 
etted pinnacles and metal roofs of the Riviera villa greeted her 
sight against the blue sky and the blue water of the Gulf of Vil- 
lafranca. 

“ This is accounted the perfection of life,” she thought — “to 
have half a dozen admirably appointed hotels all your own, and, 
among them all, no home!” 

The married life of Vere had now begun to pass into that stage 
common enough in our day, when the husband and the wife are 
utter strangers one to another, their only exchange of words be- 
ing when the presence of others compels it, and their only ap- 
pearance together being when society necessitates it. 

A sort of fear had fallen on Sergius Zouroff of her, and she 
was thankful to be left in peace. Thousands of men and women 
live thus in the world; never touch each other’s hand, never seek 
each other’s glance, never willingly spend five seconds alone, yet 
make no scandal and have no rupture, and go out into society to- 
gether, and carry on the mocking semblance Of union till death 
parts them. 

Again and again Yere on her knees in her solitude tried to ex- 
amine the past and see what blame might rest on her for her 
failure to influence her husband and withhold him from vice, 
but she could see nothing that she might have done. Even had 
she been a woman who had loved him he could have done noth- 
ing. His feeling for her had been but a mere animal impulse; 
his habits were ingrained in every fiber of his temper. If she 
had shown him any tenderness, he would have repulsed it with 
some cynical word; fidelity to his ear was a mere phrase, mean- 
ing nothing; honor in his creed was comprised in one thing only, 
never to shrink before a man. Even if she had been a woman 
who had cared for him, she would have no power to alter his 
ways of life. Innocent women seldom have any influence. 


MOTHS. 


m 


Jeanne de Sonnaz could always influence Zouroff; /ere neve* 
could have done so, let her have essayed what she would. For, 
be the fault where it may in our social system, the wife never 
has the power or the dominion that has the mistress. 

A proud woman, moreover, will not stoop as low as it is neces- 
sary to do to seize the reins of tyranny over a fickle or sluggish- 
tempered man; what is not faithful to her, of its own will, a 
proud woman lets go where it may, without effort, and with 
resignation or with scorn, according as love or indifference binds 
her to the faithless. 

The first thing she found on her table at Villafranca was a 
letter from her mother. 

Lady Dolly had found the Caucasus quite stupidly like the 
Engadine; she thought St. Petersburg a huge barrack and hid- 
eous; the weather was horribly cold, and she was coming back to 
Paris as quickly as she could. She would just stay a day, passing, 
at Villafranca. 

“ Count Rostrow has not come up to her expectations of him,’* 
thought Madame Nelaguine. 

Vere said nothing. 

If she could have prayed for anything, she could have prayed 
never to be near her mother. Lady Dolly was a living pain, a 
living shame, to her now, even as she had been on that first day 
when she had stepped on shore from the boat of Correze, and 
seen the figure of her mother in the black and yellow stripes of 
the bathing-dress, out in the full sunshine of Trouville. 

But Lady Dolly wanted to forget the slights of Count Ros- 
trow ; wanted to play at Monaca ; wanted to be seen by her 
English friends with * her daughter ; and so Lady Dolly, who 
never studied any wishes but her own, and never missed a point 
in the game of self she always played, chose to come to Villa- 
franca. 

“ I really do think Vere is wicked !” said Lady Dolly as she 
drove up between the laurel and myrtle hedges, and looked up at 
the white walls and green verandas of the villa, rising above the 
palms and magnolias and Indian conifers© of its grounds. 
‘•With three such places on three seas, and two such houses in 
Paris and St. Petersburg as she has, what on earth can she want 
co be happy I” 

Honestly, she could not understand it. It seemed to her very 
strange. 

“ But she is within a stone’s throw of the tables, and she has 
oceans of money, and yet she never plays,” she thought again ; 
and this seemed to her more unnatural still. 

“ She is very odd in all ways,” she thought, in conclusion, as 
the carriage brushed the scent out of the bruised arbutus leaves 
as it passed. 

Life for Vere was quieter on the Riviera than elsewhere. 
There were but a few people in the house ; her husband spent 
nearly the whole of his time at Monte Carlo ; and she had much 
of her own free to do with as she chose. 

Her husband never asked her to go to Monte Carlo. It was 
the one phase of the world that he spared her. In himself ho 


270 


MOTHS. 


felfe that he did not care for those grand grave eyes to see him 
throwing away his gold, and getting drunk with the stupid in- 
toxication of that idiotic play, with his belles petites about him, 
and the unlovely crowd around. Vere lived within a few miles 
of the brilliant hell under the Tete der Chein, but she had never 
once set foot in it. She was thankful that her husband spared 
her so much as that. The change from the strong air of the 
Baltic to the hot and languid autumn weather of the South affect- 
ed her strength; she felt languid and unwell. She had been reared 
in the fierce fresh winds of the North, and those rose-scented 
breezes and fragrant orange alleys seemed to stifle her in “aro- 
matic pain.” 

“Perhaps I grow fretful and fanciful,” she thought, with a 
sudden alarm and anger at herself. “What use is it for me to 
blame each place I live in? The malady is in myself. If I could 
only work, be of use, care for something, I should be well enough. 
If I could be free ” 

She paused with a shiver. 

Freedom for her could only mean death for her husband. To 
the sensitive conscience of Vere it seemed like murder to wish 
for any liberty or release that could only be purchased at such a 
cost as that. 

Jeanne de Sonnaz could calmly reckon up and compare her 
chances of loss and gain if her placid Paul should pass from the 
living’ world; but Vere could do nothing of the kind. Although 
Sergius Zouroff outraged and insulted her in many ways, and 
was a daily and hourly horror to her, yet she remained loyal to 
him, even in her thoughts. 

“I eat his bread, and wear his clothes, and spend his gold,” 
she thought, bitterly. “ I owe him at least fidelity such as his 
servants give in exchange for food and shelter!” 

There were times when she was passionately tempted to cast 
off everything that was his, and go out, alone and unaided, and 
work for her living, hidden in the obscurity of poverty, but free 
at least from the horrible incubus of an abhorred union. But 
the straight and simple rectitude in which she had been reared, 
the severe rendering of honor and of obligation in which she had 
been trained, were with her- too strongly ingrained to let her be 
untrue to them. 

“ I must bide the brent,” she told herself, in the old homely 
words of the Border people; and her delicate face grew colder 
and prouder every day. The iron was in her soul, the knotted 
cords were about her waist; but she bore a brave countenance 
serenely. She could not endure that her world should pity her. 

Her world, indeed, never dreamed of doing so. Society does 
not pity a woman who is a great lady, who is young, and who 
could have lovers and courtiers by the crowd if only she smiled 
once. 

Society only thought her — unamiable. 

True, she never said an unkind thing, or did one; she never 
hurt man or woman: she was generous to a fault, and, to aid even 
people she despised, would give herself trouble unending. Bu* 
these are serious simple qualities that do not show much, and are 


MOTHS. 


271 


soon forgotten ny those who benefit from them. Had she laughed 
more, danced more, taken more kindly to the fools and tlieir 
follies, she might have been acid of tongue and niggard of 
sympathy; society would have thought her much more amiable 
than it did now. 

Her charities were very large, and they were charities often 
done in secrecy to those of her own rank, who came to her in 
the desperation of their own needs, or their sons’ or their 
brothers’ debts of honor; but it would have served her in better 
stead with the world if she had stayed for the cotillons, or if she 
had laughed heartily when Madame Judic sang. 

It would have been so much more natural. 

“If she would listen to me!” thought her mother in the 
superior wisdom of her little popular life. “If she would only 
kiss a few women in the morning, and flirt with a few men in 
the evening, it would set her all right with them in a month. It 
is no use doing good to anybody; they only hate you for it. You 
have seen them in their straits; it is like seeing them without 
their teeth or their wig; they never forgive it. But to be pleas- 
ant, always to be pleasant, that is the thing; and, after all, it 
costs nothing.” 

But to be pleasant in Lady Dolly’s and the world’s meaning of 
the words was not possible to Vere — Vere, with an aching heart, 
an outraged pride, and a barren future; Vere, haughty, grave, 
and delicate of taste, to whom the whole life she led seemed 
hardly better or wiser than sitting out the glittering absurdities 
of the Timbale d’ Argent or Niniche. 

One warm day in December she had the unusual enjoyment 
of being alone from noon till night. All in the house were away 
at Monte Carlo, and Madame Nelaguine had gone for the day to 
San Remo to see her Empress. It was lovely weather, balmy 
and full of fragrance, cold enough to make furs needful at 
nightfall, but without wind, and with a brilliant sun. 

Vere wandered about the gardens till she was tired; then, her 
eyes lighting on her own felucca moored with other pleasure- 
boats at the foot of the garden-quay, she looked over the blue 
tranquil sea, went down the stairs, and pushed the little vessel 
off from shore. She had never lost her childish skill at boating 
and sailing. She set the little sail, tied the tiller-rope to her 
foot, and, with one oar, sent herself quickly and lightly through 
the still water. There was nothing in sight; the shore was as 
deserted as the sea. It was only one o’clock. The orange- 
groves and pine woods of the villa shed their sweet smell for 
miles over the sea. She ceased to row, and let the boat drift 
with the slight movement of the buoyant air. 

She was glad to be alone — absolutely alone— away from all the 
trifling interruptions which are to some natures as mosquitoes to 
the flesh. 

She passed a fishing-felucca, and asked the fisherman in it if 
the weather would hold: he told her it would be fine like that till 
the new year. She let the boat go on. The orangeries and pine 
woods receded farther and farther, the turrets of the Villa Zour- 
off grew smaller and smaller in the distance. 


272 


MOTHS . 


Air and sea, space and solitude, were delightful to her Almost 
for the moment, going through that sparkling water, she realized 
her youth, and felt that twenty years was still not on her head. 
As she lay back in the little vessel, her shoulders resting on its 
silken cushions, the oar lying idle, her eyes gazing wistfully into 
the depths of the azure sky, she did not see a canoe that, lying off 
the shore when she had taken the water, had followed her at a little 
distance. 

Suddenly, with a quick arrow-like dart , it covered the space 
dividing it from her, and came alongside of her boat. 

“Princess,” said the voice of Correze, “ the sea is kind to me, 
whether it be in North or South. But are you quite wise to be so 
far out on it all alone?” 

He saw the face that never changed for all the praise of princes 
or the homage of courts, and always was so cold, grow warm and 
lighten with surprise and welcome — wonder in the great grave 
eyes, a smile on the proud mouth. 

“ You!” she said, simply. 

He had had much flattery and much honor in his life, but 
nothing that had ever seemed to him so sweet, so great, as that 
one word, and the accent of it. 

“I!” he said simply too, without compliment. “ I am a stormy 
petrel, you know; never at rest. I could not help hovering near 
your lonely sail in case of any sudden change of weather. These 
waters are very treacherous.” 

“ Are they?” said Yere, without thinking. She grew confused; 
she thought of the Wolfinia, of the Kermesse, of her husband’s 
invitation to Svir, of his last words in the Spitalkirche, of many 
things all at once; and the gladness with which she saw him 
startled her — it seemed so strange to be so glad at anything! 

“ The fisherman says this weather will last till the new year,” 
she said, feeling that her voice was not quite steady. 

Correze had one hand on the side of her boat. 

“ The fisherman would know better than I, certainly,” he an- 
swered. “ But the fishermen are over-sanguine sometimes; and 
there is a white look in the south that I do not like, as if Africa 
were sending us some squall. If I might venture to advise you, 
I would say, turn your helm homeward. You are very far off 
shore.” 

“You are as far.” 

“I followed you.” 

Vere was silent ; she spent the next few moments in tacking 
and bringing the head of her little vessel landward once more. 

“ I thank you,” said Correze, as she obeyed him. 

She did not ask him why. 

“There is no tide, the clever people tell us, in the Mediter- 
ranean,” he continued. “ But there is something that feels very 
unpleasantly like it sometimes, when a boat wants to go against 
the wind. You see a breeze has sprung up ; that white cloud 
will be black before long.” 

“Are we really very far from the land?” 

“ A mile or two. It will take some stiff rowing to get there.” 

“ But the sun is so bright — ” 


MOTHS. 


273 


“Ah, yes. I have seen the sun brilliant one moment, and the 
next the white squall was down in a fury whirling mist and # 
darkened air. Take your second oar.” 

The wind began to stir, as he had foreseen, the white in the 
south grew leaden-colored, the swell in the sea grew heavy. 
Vere took in her sail, and the resistance of the water to the oars 
grew strong for her hands. 

“With your permission,” said Correze; and he balanced him- 
self on his canoe, tied its prow to the stern of her boat, and 
leaped lightly into her little vessel. 

“ If it get rougher, that might have become harder to do,” he 
said, apologetically; “and, in the sea that we shall soon have, 
you will be unable to both steer and row. Will you allow me to 
take your oars?” 

She gave them to him in silence, and took the tiller-ropes into 
her hands. 

She saw that he was right. 

An angry wind had risen, shrill and chill. The foam of the 
tideless sea was blowing around them like white powder scat- 
tered by a great fan. There was a raw, hard feeling in the air, 
a moment before so sunny and laden only with the scent of 
orange and pine wood. The sky was overcast, and some sea- 
birds were screaming. 

Neither he nor she spoke; he bent with a will to his oars, she 
steered straight for the shore. The wind chopped and changed, 
and came now from the west and now from mountains; either 
way it was against them. 

He had taken a waterproof from his canoe and put it about 
her. 

“ Never trust the sun when you come seaward,” he said, with a 
smile. 

Without it she would have been wet through from the spray, 
for her gown was only of ivory-white cashmere and ill-fitted for 
rough weather. 

Correze rowed on in silence, pulling hard against the heavy 
water. 

Both thought of the morning on the sea in Calvados, and ths 
memory was too present to both for either to speak of it. 

“ There is no real danger,” he said once, as the boat was swept 
by a rush of water. 

“ I am not afraid. Do you think I am?” said Vere, with a mo- 
mentary smile. 

“No, I do not. Fear is not in your temper,” said Correze. 
“But most other women would be. The sea will soon stand up 
like a ston« wall between us and the land.” 

“Yes?” said Vere, absently. She was thinking very little of 
the sea. Then she added, with a sudden recollection and a pang 
of self-reproach: “I was very imprudent; I am sorry. It is I 
who have brought you into this danger — for danger I think there 
must be.” 

“ Oh, as for that ” said Correze, and he laughed lightly. In 

his heart he thought, “ To die with vou — how sweet it would be! 
How right were the old poets'** 


8?4 


sloths: 

Peril, to a degree, there was, because it became very probable 
that the cockle-shell of a pleasure-boat might heel over in the 
wind and^well, and they might have to swim for their lives; and 
they were still a long way off the land. But neither of them 
thought much of it. He was only conscious that she was near 
him, and she was wondering why such deep peace, such sweet 
safety, always seemed to fall on her in his presence. 

The sea rose, as he had said, and looked like a gray wall be- 
tween them and the coast. Mists and blowing surf obscured the 
outlines of the land; but she held the head of the boat straight 
against the battling waves, and he rowed with the skill that ho 
had learned of Venetians and Basque sea-folk in sudden storms: 
and, slowly but safely, at the last they made their way through 
the fog of foam, and whirling currents of variously driving winds, 
and brought the little vessel, with the canoe rocking behind it, 
up on to the landing-stairs that she had left in the full flood of 
sunshine two horns before. There was no rain, but the sky was 
very dark, and the spray was being driven hither and thither in 
showers. 

“Are you wet at all, princess?” he asked, as they landed. She 
turned on the steps and held out her hand. 

“ You have saved my life,” she said, in a low voice. He bowed 
low over her hand, but did not touch it with his lips. 

“ I am happy,” he said, briefly. 

There was a crowd of servants and outdoor men above on the 
head of the little garden-quay, Loris leaping and shouting in their 
midst, for all the household had discovered its mistress* absence 
and the absence of the boat, and had been greatly alarmed; for, 
if her world disliked her, her servants adored her, even while 
they were a little afraid of her. 

“ She is like no one else; she is a saint,” said the old Russian 
steward very often. “ But if she be ever in wrath with you — ah, 
then it is as if St. Dorothea struck you with her roses and broke 
your back!” 

Even as they landed the clouds burst, the rain began to fall 
in torrents, the sea leaped madly against the sea-wall of the 
gardens. 

You will come in and wait at least till the storm passes V she 
said to Correze. He hesitated. 

“ Into Prince Zouroff’s house 1” he said, aloud, with a shadow 
on his face. 

“ Into my house,” she said, with a shade of rebuke in her tone, 

“ You are too good, madame ; but, if you will permit me, I 
will seem ungrateful and leave you.” 

The servants were standing around on the strip of variegated 
marble pavement that separated the sea-wall from the house. 
He only uttered such words as they might hear. 

Vere looked at him with a wistful look in the haughty eyes that 
he would not see. ' 

“ You have saved my life,” she said again, in a soft hushed 
voice. 

“ Nay, nay,” said Correze, you have too many angels surely 


MOTHS 


276 


ever about your steps to need a sorry mortal I Princess, adieu.” 

“ But you are staying near here ?” 

“ A few days— a few hours. I am en route from Milan to 
Paris. I like Paris best when I am not on an Alp, Life should 
be toutou rien — either the boulevard or the hermitage.’' 

He did not tell her that he had come by the Riviera for the sake 
of seeing the turrets of her home above the sea, for the sake of 
the chance of beholding her walk by him in the sun upon the 
terrace above. 

“Will you not wait and see— my husband?” she said, a little 
abruptly, with a certain effort. 

“I have not the honor to know Prince Zouroff.” 

“ He will wish to thank you ” The words seemed to choke 

her; she could not finish them. 

Correze bowed with his charming grace. 

“ Princess, when shall I persuade you that I have done noth- 
ing for which to be thanked? If I may venture to remind you 
of so prosaic a thing, your dress must be damp, and mine is web 
through. I beseech you to change yours at once.” 

“ Ah I how thoughtless I am! But, if you will not come in, 
will you accept a carnage or a horse?” 

“ Thanks, no; a quick walk will do me far more good. If you 
will give the canoe shelter I shall be very indebted; but for my- 
self the shore in this wind is what will make me think of the old 
tourmentes of my home mountains. Princess, once more adieu.” 

She gave him her hand; he bent over it; a mist came before 
her eyes that was not from the driving of the sea-spray. When 
it cleared from herfleyelids, Correze was gone. 

“ If I had entered the house with her I could not have answer- 
ed for my silence. It was best to come away whilst I could,” he 
thought, as he went on along the Corniche, with the winds and 
the rains beating him back at each step, and, below him and be- 
yond, the sea a mass of white and gray steam and froth. 

When Prince Zouroff returned from Monte Carlo, he brought 
several guests with him to dinner. He had won largely, as very 
rich men often do; he was in a good humor because he had been 
well amused; and he had been driven home by his orders at so 
terrific a pace in the storm that one horse had dropped dead when 
it reached the stables. But this was not a very uncommon oc- 
currence with him; a carriage-horse did not matter; if it had 
been one of his racers it would have been a different business. 
That was all he said about it. 

Vere went up to him after dinner and took him aside one mo- 
ment. 

“ I was on the sea in the beginning of the storm.” 

“ What were you doing?” 

“ Rowing myself — all alone.” 

“ A mad freak! But nothing happened. All is well that ends 
well.” 

“Yes,” Yere’s teeth were shut a little as she spoke, and her 
lips were pale. “ It might not have ended so well — if it be well 
to live— had it not been for M. de Correze. He was in a cancs 
sand warned me in time.” 


m 


M0TH8. 


“ The singer?” 

“ M. de Correze. w 

“Well, there is only one; you mean the singer? How came 
he near you?’ 4 

“ I do not know.” 

“ And what did he do?” 

“ He saved my life.” 

Sergius Zouroff looked wearied. “You are always so 
emotional, ma chere . Do you mean he did anything I ought to 
acknowledge? Where is he to be found?” 

1 do not know.” 

“ Oh. ( I can hear at the Cercle. But are you not talking in 
hyperboles?” 

“ I told you the fact. I thought you ought to know it.” 

“Ah, yes,” said her husband, who was thinking of other 
things. “ But he did not come to sing at Svir. I cannot forgive 
that. However, I will send my card, and then you can ask him 
to dinner. Or send him a diamond ring: artists always like 
rings.” 

Vere turned away. 

“ I remember hearing once,” said Lady Dorothy, approaching 
him, “ that Correze had one thousand three hundred and seventy- 
six diamond rings, all given him by an adoring universe. You 
must think of something more original, Sergius.” 

“ Ask him to dinner,” said Prince Zouroff. “ People do; though 
it is very absurd.” 

Then he went to the card-room for ecarte , thinking no more of 
his wife than he thought of his dead horse. 

“ Correze and the sea seem quite inseparable — quite like Lean- 
der,” said Lady Dolly, who had heard the whole story before 
dinner from her maid, when she too had returned from Monte 
Carlo, But she said it half under her breath, and did not dare 
speak of it to her daughter: she was haunted by the memory of 
that letter she had received from Moscow, the letter of Correze 
that she had burned and left unanswered. 

“ It is odd that he should have been in that canoe just to-day, 
when we were all away,” she thought, with the penetration of a 
woman who knew her world, and did not believe in accidents, as 
she had once said to her child, “ And to say she does not know 
where he is — that is really too ridiculous. I am quite sure Vere 
never will do anything— anything— to make people talk, but I 
should not be in the least surprised if she were to insist on some- 
thing obstinate and romantic about this man. She is so very 
emotional. Zouroff is right, she is always in the clouds. That 
comes of being brought up on those moors by that German, and 
Correze is precisely the person to answer these fancies; even in 
daylight at a concert he is so handsome, and even in dinner-dress 
he always looks like Romeo. It would really be too funny if she 
ever did get talked about- so cold, and so reserved, and so quite 
too dreadfully and awfully good as she is!” 

And Lady Dolly looked down the drawing-rooms at her 
daughter in the distance as vere drew her white robe3 slowly 


MOTHS. 


277 


through her salons and she thought, alter all, one never 
knew 

The next day ZourofFs secretary sent his master’s card to the 
hotel where he learned that Correzewas staying, and sent also an 
invitation to dinner at an early date. Correze sent his card in 
return, and a refusal of the invitation based on the plea that he 
was leaving Nice. 

When he had written Ms refusal, Correze walked out into the 
street. He met point-blank a victoria with very gaudy liveries, 
and in the victoria muffled in sables, sat a dark-skinned, ruby- 
lipped woman. 

The brilliant and insouciant face of Correze grew dark, and he 
frowned. 

The woman was Casse-une-Croute. 

“ The brute.'’ he muttered ' If I sat at his table I should be 
choked — or I should choke him." 

As he went on he heard the gay people in the street laughing, 
and saw them look after the gaudy liveries and the quadroon. 

“ His wife is much more beautiful, and as white as a lily,” one 
man said, : * That black thing throws glasses and knives at him 
sometimes, they say. ” 

“ I protected her from Noisette. I cannot protect her here,” 
thought Correze, ‘ J Perhaps she will not know it: God send her 
ignorance!” 

The talk of Nice was Casse-une-Croute, who had arrived but a 
week or so before. She had a villa in the town, she had her car- 
riage and horses from Paris, she spent about sixty napoleons a 
day, without counting what she lost at Monte Carlo; the city 
preferred her to any English peeress or German princess of them 
all. When the correspondents of journals of society sent their 
budgets from Nice and Monaco, they spoke first of all of Casse- 
une-Croute; the Princess Zouroff came far afterward with other 
great ladies in their chronicles. 

When Casse-une-Croute after supper set fire to Prince Zouroff ’s 
beard, and shot away her chandelier with a saloon pistol, her 
feats were admiringly recorded in type. Yere did not read those 
papers, so she knew nothing; and the ignorance Correze prayed 
for her remained with her; she did not even know that Casse-une- 
Croute was near her. 

A little later in that day Correze met Lady Dolly at Monte 
Carlo. She greeted him with effusion; he was courteous, but a 
little cold. She felt it, but she would not notice it. 

“ So you saved my Yere’s life yesterday, Correze?” she said, 
with charming cordiality. “ So like you! Always in some beau 
role!” 

“It would be a beau role , indeed, to have saved the Princess 
Zouroff from any danger; but it is not for me. I warned her of 
the change in the weather; that was all.” 

“You are too modest. True courage always is, I' think you 
rowed her boat home for her, didn’t you ?” 

“ Part of the way — yes. The sea was heavy.” 

She quite thinks you saved her life,” said Lady Dolly. “ My 
sweet Yera is always a little exaltee . you know , you can see that 


278 


MOTHS. 


if you look at her. One always rather expects to hear her speak 
in blank verse : don’t you know what I mean ?” 

“ Madame, I have heard so much blank verse in my life that I 
should as soon expect frogs to drop from her lips,” answered Cor- 
reze, a little irritably. “No, I do not think I know what you 
mean. The Princess Vera seems to me to play a very difficult 
part in the world’s play with an exquisite serenity, patience, and 
good taste.” 

“ A difficult part ! Goodness ! My dear Correze, she has only 
to look beautiful, go to courts, and spend money !” 

“ And forgive infidelity, and bear with outrage.” 

TTis voice was low, but it was grave and even stern, as his face 
was. 

Lady Dolly, who was going up towards the great Palace of Play, 
stopped, stared, and put up a scarlet sunshade, which made her 
look as if she blushed. 

“ My dear Correze! I suppose people of genius are privileged, 
but otherwise — really — you have said such an extraordinary 
thing I ought not to answer you. The idea of judging between 
married people! The idea of supposing that Prince Zouroif is 
not everything he ought to be to his wife ’* 

Correze turned his clear lustrous eyes full on her. 

“ Miladi,” he said, curtly, “ I wrote you some truths of Prince 
Zouroff from Moscow long ago. Did you read them?” 

“ Oh, stories! mere stories!” said Lady Dolly, vaguely and nerv- 
ously. “You know I never listen to rumors; people are so 
horridly uncharitable.” 

“ You had my letter from Moscow, then?” 

“ Oh, yes, and answered it,” said Lady Dolly, with aplomb. 

“ I think you forgot to answer it,” said Correze, quietly, “ your 
answer was a faire part to the marriage.” 

“ I am sure I answered it,” said Lady Dolly once more, looking 
up into the scarlet dome of her umbrella. 

“ I told you, and proved to you, that the man to whom you 
wished to sacrifice your child was a mass of vice — of such vice as 
it is the fashion to pretend to believe shut up between the pages 
of Seutonius and Livy. And I offered, if you would give me 
your young daughter, to settle a million of francs upon her and 
leave the stage for her sake. Your answer was the faire part to 
the Zouroff marriage.” 

“ I answered you,” said Lady Dolly, obstinately; “ oh, dear, 
yes, I did. I can’t help it if you didn’t get it; and I had told you 
at Trouville it was no use, that idea of yours; you never were 
meant to marry — so absurd! — you are far too charming; and, be- 
sides, you know you are an artist; you can’t say you are not.” 

“I am an artist,” said Correze, with a flash somber and bril- 
liant in his eyes that she could not front, “ but I have never been 
a beast, and had I wedded your daughter I would not have been 
an adulterer.” 

“Hus-s-sh!” said Lady Dolly, scandalized. Such language 
was terrible to her, though she did laugh at the Petit Duo and 
Niniohe. “ Hus-s-sh, hush— pray!” 

But Correze had bowed and left her 


MOTHS . 


278 


Lady Dolly went on between the cactus and the palms and the 
myrtles, looking dreamily up into the scarlet glow of her sun- 
shade, and thinking that when you let artists and people of that 
sort into your world they were quite certain to froisser you 
sooner or later. “ And I am sure he is in love with her still,” 
she thought, as she joined some pleasant people and went up to 
the great building to hear the music — only for that; the music 
at Monte Carlo is always so good. 

“As if I would ever have given my child to a singer!” she 
thought, in the disgust of mingled virtue and pride. 

At the entrance of the hall she met her son-in-law, who was 
coming out, having won largely. 

“ I forgot my purse, Sergius: lend me the sinews of war,” said 
Lady Dolly, with a laugh. 

He handed her some rouleaux . 

“ Some one would plunder me before I got through the gar- 
dens,” he said to himself as he sauntered on: “it may as well oe 
Dolly as another.” 

Lady Dolly went on and staked her gold. At the same table 
with her were Aimee Princee of the Hippodrome, and Casse-une- 
Croute; but Lady Dolly was not hurt by that either in pride or in 
virtue. 

The real Commune is Monte Carlo. 

Meanwhile, Correze did not approach Vere. 

i ‘ If you ever need a servant or an avenger, call me,” he had 
said to*her, but he had known that she never would call him. 
Prom afar off he had kept watch on her life, but that was all. 

She knew that he was near her, and the knowledge changed 
the current of her days from a joyless routine to a sweet yet bit- 
ter unrest. When the sun rose, she thought, “ Shall I see him?” 
When it set, she thought, “ Will he come to-morrow?” . The ex- 
pectation gave a flush of color and hope to her life, which, with 
all its outward magnificence, was chill and pale as the life of a 
pauper because its youth was crushed under the burden of a 
loveless splendor. 

For the first time this warm winter of the Southern sea-board, 
with its languid air, its dancing sunbeams, its doors of roses and 
violets and orange-buds, seemed lovely to her. She did not 
reason; she did not reflect; she only vaguely felt that the earth 
had grown beautiful. 

Once, while the air was still dark with the shadows of night, 
but the sky had the red of the dawn, she, lying wide awake upon 
her bed, heard the voice upon the sea beneath the windows sing- 
ing Stella virginie , madre pescatore! of the Italian fisherman, and 
knew that the voice was his. 

At that hour Sergius Zouroff was drinking brandy in the rooms 
of Casse-une-Croute, while the quadroon was shooting the glass 
drops off her chandelier. 

One day she went to see the village priest about some poor of 
the place, and sought him at the church of the parish. It was a 
little whitewashed barn, no more, but it had thickets of roses 
about it, and a belt of striped aloes, and two tall palms rose 
straight above it, and beyond its narrow door there shone the sea. 


280 


MOTHS . 


She went towards the little sacristy to speak to the priest. Ma« 
dame Nelaguine was with her. They met Correze on the threshold. 
Mass was just over. It was the day of St. Lucy. 

“ Have you been to mass at our church and do Hot visit us? 
cried Princess Nadine, in reproach, as she saw him. “That is 
not kind, monsieur, especially when we have so much for which 
to thank you. My brother would be very glad of an occasion to 
speak his gratitude.” 

“ Prince Zouroff owes me none, madame,” said Correze. V ere 
had been silent. “ Is the little church yours?” he continued. “ It 
is charming. It is almost as primitive as St. Augustine or St. 
Jerome could wish it to be, and it is full of the smell of the sea 
and the scent of the roses.” 

“ It is the church of our parish,” said Madame Nelaguine. 
« We have our own chapel in the villa for our own priest, of 
course. Were you not coming to us? No? You are too farouche. 
Even to persons of your fame one cannot allow such willful 
isolation; and why come to this very gay sea-board if you want 
to be alone?” 

“ I came by way of going to Paris from Milan; indeed, in Paris 
I must be in a very few days; I have to see half a score of direct- 
ors there. Which of the three seas that you honor with resi- 
dence do you prefer, mesdames?” 

“Why does Vere not speak to him, and why does he not 
look at her?” thought the Princess Nelaguine, as she answered 
aloud — 

“Myself, I infinitely prefer the Mediterranean, but Yera per- 
sists in preferring the narrow, colorless strip of the Northern 
Channel. It is not like her usual good taste.” 

“The climate of Calvados is most like that which the princess 
knew in her childhood,” Correze said, with a little haste. “ Child- 
hood goes with us like an echo always, a refrain to the ballad of 
our life. One always wants one’s cradle-air. Were I to meet 
with such an accident as Roger did, I would go to a goat-hut on 
my own Alps above Sion.” 

“You would? How charming that would be for the goats and 
their sennerins!” said Madame Nelaguine, as she caught a glimpse 
of the priest’s black soutane behind the roses, and chased it 
through the hedge of aloes, and caught the good man, who was 
very shy of this keen, quick, sardonic Russian lady. 

“You might have been dead in those seas the other day — for 
me,” said Vere, in a low voice, without looking at him, as they 
stood alone. 

“ Ah, nothing so beautiful is in store for me, princess,” he an- 
swered, lightly, “Indeed, you overrate my services: without 
me, no doubt, you would have brought your boat in very well; 
you are an accomplished sailor.” 

“ I should have stayed out without noticing the storm,” said 
Vere; “ and then — Loris would have been sorry, perhaps.” 

Correze was silent. 

He would not let his tongue utter the answer that rose to hie 
Ups. 


MOTHS. 2«i 

“We are too afraid of death,” he said: “that fear is the shame 
of Christianity.” 

“ I do not fear it,” said Yere, in a low tone, her eyes gazing 
through the screen of roses to the sea. 

“ And you have not twenty years on your head yet!” said Cor- 
reze, bitterly, “ and life should be to you one cloudless spring 
morning, full only of blossom and of promise ” 

“I have what I deserve, no doubt.” 

“You have nothing that you deserve.” 

Madame Nelaguine came back to them with the priest. 

“ Why did you not come to Svir?” she asked of Correze, as the 
curate made his obeisance to Yere. 

“ I had not the honor to know your brother.” 

“No; but I believe ” 

“ He offered to pay me ? Oh, yes. He was dans san droit in 
doing that; but I, too, had my rights, and among them was the 
right to refuse, and I took it. No doubt he did not know that I 
never take payments out of the opera-house.” 

“ I see! you are cruelly proud.” 

“Am I proud? Perhaps. I have my own idea of dignity, a 
4 poor thing, but my own.’ When I go into society I like to be 
free; and so I do not take money from it. Many greater artists 
than I, no doubt, have thought differently. But it is my fancy.” 

“ But other artists have not been Marquises de Correze,” said 
Madame Nelaguine. 

“ Nay, I have no title, madame,” said Correze: “ it was buried 
in another generation under the snows above Sion, and I have 
never dug it up; why should I?” 

“Why should you, indeed? There is but one Correze; there 
are four thousand marquises to jostle one another in their strug- 
gles for precedence.” 

He laughed a little as he bowed to her. “ Yes, I am Correze 
tout court. I like to think that one word tells its own tale all 
over the world to the nations. No doubt this is only another 
shape of vanity, and not dignity at all. One never knows one- 
self. I do not" care to set up my old couronne; it would be out 
of place in the theaters. But I like to think that I have it; and 
if ever I need to cross swords with a noble, he cannot refuse on 
the score of my birth.” 

His face grew darker as he spoke, he pulled the roses one from 
another with an impatient action; the quick marmoset eyes of 
Madame Nelaguine saw that he was thinking of some personal 
foe. 

“I suppose you have had duels before now,” she said, indif- 
ferently. 

“ No,” answered Correze. “ No man ever insulted me yet, 
and I think no man ever will. I do not like brawling; it is a 
sort of weakness with my fraternity, who are an irritable genus; 
but I have always contrived to live in amity. Yet — there are 
offenses for which there is no punishment except the old one of 
blood.” 

He was thinking of what he bad seen that night— Sergius 
Zouroff against the shoulder of Casse-une-Croute playing at the 


282 


MOTHS. 


rouiette-table whilst his wife was left alone. Madame Nelaguine 
looked at him narrowly; Vere was standing a little apart, listen- 
ing to the good priest’s rambling words. 

“M. le Marquis,” she said, with a little smile, “you are very 
well known to be the gentlest and sunniest of mortals, as well as 
the sweetest singer that ever lived. But do you know? — I think 
you could be very terrible if you were very angry. I think it is 
quite as well that you do not fight duels?” 

“I may fight them yet,” said Correze; “and do not give me 
that title, madame, or I shall think you laugh at me. I am only 
Correze!” 

“ Only! ‘ I am Arthur, said the king!’ Will you not be merci- 
ful in your greatness, and come and sing to us as a friend here, 
though you would not come as a guest to Svir?” 

Correze was silent. 

“ Do come to-night: you would make me so proud. We have 
a few people,” urged the Princess Nadine, “ and you know,” she 
added, “ that to me your art is a religion.” 

“You make it difficult indeed to refuse,” said Correze; “ but I 
have not the honor to know Prince Zouroff.” 

“With what an accent he says that ‘honor!’” thought the 
Bister of Zouroff; but she said aloud, “ That is my brother’s mis- 
fortune, not his fault. Vera, ask this Roi Soleil to shine on our 
house. He is obstinate to me. Perhaps he will not be so to 
you.” 

Vere did not lift her eyes; her face flushed a little as she turned 
toward him. 

“We should be happy if you would break your rule — for us.” 

She spoke with effort; she could not forget what he had said on 
his knees before her in the little church at Old Aussee. Correze 
bowed. 

“ I will come for an hour, mes princesses , and I will sing for 
you both.” 

Then he made his adieu and went away. 

Vere and her sister-in-law returned to the house. Madame 
Nelaguine was unusually grave. 

When they went home, they found the newspapers of the day: 
the lightest and wittiest of them contained a florid account of 
the rescue from a sea-storm of a Russian princess by Correze. 
Without a name the Russian princess was so described that all 
her world could know beyond doubt who it was. 

“ Really position is a pillory nowadays,” said Madame Nela- 
guine, angrily: “ sometimes they pelt one with rose-leaves, and 
sometimes with rotten eggs, but one is forever in the pillory.” 

When Sergius Zouroff read it he was very enraged. 

“ Patience!” said his sister, dryly, when his wife was out of 
hearing. “ In to-morrow’s number I dare say they will describe 
you and the quadroon,” 

Then she added, “ Correze will come here this evening; he will 
come to sing for me; you must not offer him anything, not even a 
ring, or you will insult him.” 

“Pshaw!” said Zouroff, roughly* “Why- do you not get 


MOTHS. 


288 


others to sing for you whom you can pay properly like artists? 
There are many.” 

“ Many singers like Correze? I am afraid not. But I induced 
him to come, not only for his singing, but because when he has 
saved your wife’s life it is as well you should look thankful, even 
if you do not feel so.” 

“You grow as romantic as she is, in your old age, Nadine,” 
said Zouroff, with a shrug of his shoulders. 

“In old age, perhaps, one appreciates many things that one 
overlooks in one's youth,” said the princess, unruffled, and with 
a little sigh. “ Twenty years ago I should not have appreciated 
your wife, perhaps, much more than you do.” 

“ Do you find her amusing?” he said, with a little laugh and a 
yawn. 

Later in that day Vere drove out alone. Madame Nelaguine 
was otherwise occupied, and her mother was away spending a 
day or two with a friend who had a villa at La Condamine. She 
had never once driven down the Promenade des Anglais since she 
had been on the Riviera tliis year, but this day her coachman 
took his way along that famous road because the house to which 
she was going, a house taken by Vladimir Zouroff, and at which 
his wife, a pretty Galician woman, lay ill, could not so quickly or 
so easily he reached any other way. She drove alone, her only 
companion, Loris, stretched on the opposite cushions, beside a 
basket of violets and white lilacs which she was taking to Sophie 
Zouroff. The afternoon was brilliant; the snow-white palaces, 
the green gardens, and the azure sea sparkled in the sunlight*, 
the black Orloffs flew over the ground tossing their silver head- 
pieces and flashing their fiery eyes; people looked after them and 
told one another, “ That is the Princess Vera; look, that is the 
great Russian’s wife.” 

Vere, leaning back with Loris at her feet, had a white covering 
of polar bear-skins cast over her; she had on her the black sables 
which had been in her marriage corbeille; the black and white in 
their strong contrast enhanced and heightened the beauty of her 
face and the fairness of her hair; in her hand she held on her lap 
a great cluster of lilies of the valley. 

“ That beautiful, pale woman is 'Prince Zouroff’s wife; he must 
have strange taste to leave her,” said one man to another, as she 
passed. 

There were many carriages out that day, as usual before sun- 
set: the black Russian horses dashed through the crowd at their 
usual headlong gallop, tossing their undocked manes and tails in 
restless pride. Close against them passed two bays at full trot ; the 
bays were in a victoria; in the victoria was a woman, swarthy and 
lustrous- eyed, who wore a Russian kaftan and had black Russian 
sables thrown about her shoulders; she was smoking; she blew 
some smoke in the air and grinned from ear to ear as she went 
past the Zouroff carriage; in her own carriage, lying back in it, 
was Sergius Zouroff. 

A slight flush, that went over Vere's face to her temples and 
then faded to leave her white as new-fallen snow, was the only 
sign she gave that she had recognized her husband with the 


*84 


MOTHS. 


quadroon who was called Casse-une-Croufce. Another moment, 
and the black Orloffs, flying onward in a cloud of dust and flood 
of sunlight, had left the bays behind them. Yere bent her face 
over the lilies of the valley. 

Half a mile farther she checked their flight, and told the coach- 
man to return home by another road instead of going onward to 
Sophie Zouroff’s. 

When she reached the villa it was twilight — the short twilight 
of a winter day on the Mediterranean. She went up to her bed- 
chamber, took off her sables, and with her own hands wrapped 
them all together, rang for her maid, and gave the furs to her. 

“ When the prince comes in, take these to him,” she said, in a 
calm voice, “ and tell him I have no farther use for them; he 
may have some.” 

The woman, who was faithful to her and knew much of the 
patience with which she bore her life, looked grave as she took 
them; she guessed what had happened. 

It was six o’clock. 

The Princess Nadine came for a cup of yellow tea in Vere’s 
dressing-room. She found her gentle and serious as usual; as 
usual a good listener to the babble of pleasant cynicisms and 
philosophic commentaries with which Madame Nelaguine always 
was ready to garnish and enliven the news of the hour. 

Madame Nelaguine did not notice anything amiss. 

An hour later, when Zouroff came home to dress for dinner, 
the waiting- worn an, who loved her mistress and was very loyal 
to her, took him the sables and the message. 

He stared, but said nothing. He understood. 

The Prince of Monaco and other princes dined at the Zouroff 
villa that evening. There was a dinner party of forty people in 
all. He did not see his wife until the dinner-hour. Vere was 
pale with the extreme pallor that had come on her face at sight 
of the quadroon; she wore white velvet, and had a knot of white 
lilac at her breast, and her only ornaments were some great 
pearls given her by the Herberts on her marriage. 

He stooped toward her a moment, under pretext of raising 
a handkerchief she had dropped. 

“Madame,” he said, in a harsh whisper, “ I do not like coups de 
theatre , and with my actions you have nothing to do. You will 
wear your sables and drive on the Promenade de Anglais to- 
morrow. Do you hear ?” he added, as she remained silent. Then 
she looked at him. 

“ I hear; but I shall not do it.” 

“You will not do it?” 

“No.” 

Their guests entered. Vere received them with her usual cold 
and harmonious grace. 

“Really she is a grand creature,” thought Zouroff, with unwill- 
ing respect, “ but I will break her will : I never thought she had 
any until this year ; now she is stubborn as a mule.” > 

The long dinner went on its course, and was followed by an 
animating evening. Madame Nelaguine had always made the 
Zouroff entertainments more brilliant than most, from their sur- 


MOTHS. m 

prises, their vivacity, and their entrain , and this was no excep- 
tion to the rest. 

That Prince Zouroff himself was gloomy made no cause for re- 
mark ; ho never put any curb on his temper either for society or 
in private life, and the world was used to his fits of moroseneas. 
“The Tsar sulks,” his sister would always say, with a laugh, of 
him, and so covered his ill-humor with a jest. This night she did 
not jest : her fine instincts told her that there was a storm in the 
air. 

About eleven o’clock every one was in the white drawing- 
room, called so because it was hung with white silk and had 
white china mirrors and chandeliers. Two clever musicians, 
violinist and pianist, had executed some pieces of Liszt and 
Schumann; they were gone, and two actors from the Folies Dra- 
matiques had glided in as Louis Treize personages, played a witty 
little revue , written for the society of the hour, and had in turn 
vanished. Throughout the long white room, in which the only 
color allowed came from banks and pyramids of rose-hued aza- 
leas, there was on every side arising that animated babel of polite 
tongues which tells a hostess that her people are well amused 
with her and with themselves, and that the specter of ennui is 
scornfully exorcised. 

Suddenly the doors opened, and the servants announced 
Correze. 

“ Quel bonheur!” cried Madame Nelaguine, and muttered to 
her brother, “ Say something cordial and graceful, Sergius; you 
can when you like.” 

Correze was bending low before the mistress of the house; for 
the first time he saw the moth and the star at her throat. 

* Present me to M. de Correze, Vera,” said her husband, and 
she did so. 

“ I owe you much, and I am happy to be able in my own 
house to beg you to believe in my gratitude, and to command it 
when you will,” said Zouroff, with courtesy and the admirable 
manner which he could assume with suavity and dignity when 
he chose. 

“ I was more weatherwise than a fisherman, monsieur; that is 
all the credit I can claim,” said Correze, lightly and coldly. 
Every one had ceased their conversation, men had lost their in- 
terest in women’s eyes, the very princes present grew eager, and 
were thrown into the shade. Correze had come — Correze, with 
the light on his poetic face, his grace of attitude, his sweet, far- 
reaching voice, his past of conquest, his present of victory, his 
halo of fame, his sorcery of indifference. 

Correze stood by the side of his hostess, and there was a gleam 
of challenge in his eyes, usually so dreamy, this night so lumin- 
ous; he was as pale as she. 

“ I came to sing some songs to mesdames your sister and your 
wife,” said Correze, a little abruptly to Zouroff. “ Is that your 
piano? You will permit me?” 

He moved to it quickly, 

“Ho knows why he is asked to come,” thought Zouroff, but 


286 MOTHS . 

lie speaks oddly; one would think he were the prince and I 
the artist!” 

“He is a rarer sort of prince than you,” murmured Madame 
Nelaguine, who guessed his thoughts. “Do not touch him 
rudely, or the nightingale will take wing.” 

Oorreze struck one loud chord on the notes, and through the 
long white room there came a perfect silence. 

Not thrice in twelve months was he ever heard out of his 
own opera-houses. 

He paused with his hands on the keys; he looked down the 
drawing-room ; all he saw of all that was around him were a 
sea of light, a bloom of rose-red flowers, a woman’s figure in 
white velvet, holding a white fan of ostrich feathers in her 
hand, and with a knot of white lilac at her breast. He closed; 
his eyelids rapidly one instant, as a man does who is dazzled 
by flame or blinded with a mist of tears; then he looked stead- 
ily down the white room and sang a Noel of Felicien David’s. 

Never in all his nights of triumph had he sung more superb- 
ly. He was still young, and his voice was in its perfection. He 
could do what he chose with it, and he chose to-night to hold 
that little crowd of tired great people hanging on his lips as 
though they were sheep that hearkened to Orpheus. 

He chose to show her husband and her world what spell he 
could use, what power he could wield — a charm that their 
riches could not purchase, a sorcery their rank could not com- 
mand. He was in the mood to sing, and he sang, as generously 
as in his childhood he had warbled his wood-notes wild to the 
winds of the mountains; as superbly and with as exquisite a 
mastery and science as he had even sung with to the crowded 
theaters of the great nations of the world. 

The careless and fashionable crowd listened, and was elec- 
trified into emotion. It could not resist; men were dumb and 
women heard with glistening eyes and aching hearts; Sergius 
Zouroff, for whom music rarely had any charm, as he heard 
that grand voice rise on the stillness, clear as a clarion that 
calls to war, and then sink and fall to a sweetness of scarcely 
mortal sound, owned its influence, and, as he sat with his head 
downward and his heavy eyelids closed, felt dully and vaguely 
that he was vile, and Deity perchance not all a fable, and shud- 
dered a little, and felt his soul shrink before the singer’s as 
Saul’s in its madness before David. 

When Correze paused, all were silent. To give him compli- 
ment or gratitude would have seemed almost as unworthy an 
insult as to give him gold. 

Vere had not moved; she stood before the bank of azaleas 
quite motionless; she might have been of marble, for any sign 
she gave. 

Correze was silent; there was no sound in the white room ex- 
cept the murmur of the waves without against the sea wall of 
the gardens. Suddenly he looked up, and the brilliant flash of 
his gaze met Sergius Zouroff’s clouded and sullen eyes. 

“I will sing once more,” said Correze, who had risen; and he 
sat down again to the piano. “I will sing once more, since you 


MOTES. 


287 


are not weary of me. I will sing you something that you never 
heard.” 

His hands strayed over the chords in that improvisation of 
music which comes to the great singer as the sudden sonnet to 
the poet, as the burst of wrath to the orator. Oorreze was no 
mere interpreter of other men’s melody; he had melody in his 
brain, in his hands, in his soul. 

He drew a strange pathetic music from the keys; a music sad 
as death, yet with a ring of defiance in it, such defiance as had 
looked from his eyes when he entered and had stood by the 
side of the wife of Zouroff. 

He siang Da Coupe of Sully- Prudhomime — the Coupe d’Or that 
Ihe had quoted on the sands by the North Sea at Sch evening: 

“Dans les verres epais du cabaret brutal, 

De vln bleu coule a flots, et sans treve a la ronde. 

Dans le calice fin, plus rarement abonde 
Un vin dont la clarte soit digne du cristal. 

“Enfin, la coupe d’or du haut d’un piedestal 

Attend, vide toujours, bien que large et profonde, 

Un cru dont la noblesse a la sienne reponde: 

On tremble d’en souiller l’ouvrage et le metal.” 

He sang it to moiisic of his own, eloquent, weird, almost terrible 
— miusic that Seemed to search the soul 'as the rays of a lamp 
probe dark places. 

The person he looked at while he sang was Sergius Zouroff. 

Les verres epais du cabaret brutal! 

The words rang down the silence that was around him with a 
scorn that was immeasurable, with a rebuke that was majestic. 

Sergius Zouroff listened humbly, as if held under a spell; his 
eyes could not detach their gaze from the burning scorn of the 
singer. 

Les verres epais du cabaret brutal! 

The line was thundered through the stillness with a challenge 
and a meaning that none who heard it could doubt, with a pas- 
sion of scorn that cut like a scourge and spared not. 

Then his voice dropped low, and with the tenderness of an un- 
utterable yearning recited the verse he had not ispokenby the sea: 

“Plus le vase est grossier de forme et de matiere, 

Mieux il trouve a combler sa conitenance entiere, 

Aux plus beaux seulement il n’est point de liqueur.” 

There was once more a great silence. Vere still stood 1 quite 
mtotionless. 

Sergius Zouroff leaned against the white wall, with his head 
stooped and his eyes sullen and dull with an unwilling shame. 

Oorreze rose and closed the piano. 

“I came to sing; I have sung; you will allow me to leave you 
know, for I must go away by daybreak t'o Paris.” 

And though many tried to keep him, none could do so, and he 
went. 

Vere gave him her hand as he passed, out of the white draw- 
ing-room. 


m 


MOTHS : 


tl I thank Ton,” she said very low. 

The party broke up rapidly; there was a certain embarrass* 
ment and apprehension left on all the guests ; there was not one* 
there who had not understood the public rebuke given to Sergius 
Zouroff. 

He had understood it no less. 

But for his pride’s sake, which would not let him own he felt 
the disgrace of it, he would have struck the lips of the singer 
dumb. When the white; room was empty, he paced to and ire 
with quick, uneven steps. His face was livid, his eyes were sav 
age, his breath came and went rapidly and heavily ; for the first 
time in all his years a man had rebuked him. 

“You asked him here to insult me ?” he cried, pausing sudden* 
ly before his wife. She looked him full in the face. 

“No. There would be no insult in a poem unless your con- 
science made it seem one.” 

She waited a moment for his answer, but he was silent; he 
only stared at her with a stifled, bitter oath; she made a slight 
courtesy to him, and left his presence without another word. 

“You should honor his courage, Sergius,” said Madame Nela- 
guine, who remained beside him; “you must admit it was very 
courageous.” 

A terrible oath was his answer. 

“Courageous!” he said, savagely, at last; “Courageous? The 
man knows well enough that it is impossible for me to resent a 
mere song; I should be ridiculous, farceur; and he knows that I 
cannot fight him.; he is a stage-singer ” 

“He thinks himself your equal,” she answered, quietly. “ But 
probably your wife is right; it is only your conscience makes you 
see an insult in a poem.” 

“ My conscience!” Sergius Zouroff laughed aloud; then he said, 
suddenly, “Is he Vera’s lover?” 

“You are a fool,” said the Princess Nadine, with tranquil 
scorn. “ Your wife has never had any lover, and I think never 
will have one. And what lover would rebuke you? Lovers are 
like husbands: they condone.” 

“ If he be not her lover, why should he care?” 

Madame Nelaguine shrugged her shoulders. 

“ My dear Sergius, people are different. Some feel angry at 
things that do not in the least concern them, and go out of then 
way to redress wrongs that have nothing to do with them: they 
are the exaltes members of the world. Correze is one of them. 
Have you not said he is an artist? Now, I am no artist, and 
never am exaltee, and yet I also do not like to see the golden cup 
cast aside for the cabaret brutal . Good-night.” Then she too left 
him. 

The next day Madame Nelaguine went up to her sister-in-law 
on the sea-terrace of the house. Vere was sitting by the statute 
of the wingless Love; she bad a book in her hand, but she was not 
reading; her face was very calm, but there was a sleepless look 
in her eyes. The Princesse Nadine, who never in her life ha I 
known any mental or physical fear, felt afraid of her: she atV 
dresseu her a little nervously,. 


MOTHS. 


M Have you slept well, love?” 

[* Not at all,” said Yere, who did not speak falsely in little 
things or large. 

“ Ahl” sighed Madame Nelaguine, and added, wistfully, “ Yera, 
I want to ask you to be still patient, to do nothing in haste; in a 
word, to forgive still if you can. My dear, I am so pained, so 
shocked, so ashamed of all the insults my brother offers you; 
but he has had a lesson very graiScily given; it may profit him, it 
may not; but in any way, Vera, as a woman in the world who 
yet can love you, my love, I want to entreat you, for all our 
sakes, and for your own above all, not to separate yourself from 
my brother.” 

Yere, who had her eyes fixed on the distant snows of the 
mountains of Esterelle, turned and looked at her with surprise 
and with something of rebuke. 

“ You mean? — I do not think I understand you.” 

“ I mean,” murmured her sister-in-law, almost nervously, “ do 
not seek for a divorce.” 

“A divorce!” 

Yere echoed the words in a sort of scorn. 

“You do not know me much yet,” she said, calmly. “The 
woman who can wish for a divorce and drag her wrongs into 
public — such wrongs! — is already a wanton herself; at least I 
think so.” 

Madame Nelaguine breathed a little quickly with relief, yet 
with a new apprehension. 

“ You are beyond me, Yere, and in your own way you are* 
terribly stern.” 

“ What do you wish me to be?” said Yere, tranquilly. “If I 
were of softer mold I should make your brother’s name the 
shame of Europe. Be grateful to my coldness, it is his only 
shield.” 

“But you suffer ” 

“ That is nothing to any one. When I married Prince Zouroff 
I knew very well that I should suffer always. It is not his fault; 
he cannot change his nature.” 

His sister stood beside her and pulled the yellow tea-roses ab 
sently. 

“You are altogether beyond me,” she said, hurriedly, “and 
yet you are not a forgiving woman, Yere?” 

, “ Forgiveness is a very vague word; it is used with very little 

thought. No, I do not forgive, certainly. But I do not avenge 
myself by giving my name to the mob and telling the whole 
world things that I blush even to know.” 

“ Then you would never separate yourself from Sergius?” 

“ I may leave his roof if he try me too far — I have thought of 
it — but I will never ask the law to set me free from him. What 
could law do for me? It cannot undo what is done. A woman 
who divorces her husband is a prostitute legalized by ^ form; 
that is all.” 

“ You think fidelity due to the faithless?” 

“A think fidelity is the only form of chastity left to a woman 
who i3 a wife; the man’s vices cannot affect the question , lab- 


290 


MOTHS. 


hor your brother, T could strike him as a brave man strikes a 
coward, but I have taken an oath to him, and I will be true to it. 
What has the law to do with one’s own honor?” 

* 4 It is happy for him that you have such unusual feeling,” said 
Madame Nelaguine, with a little acrimony, because she herself 
had been far from guiltless as a wife. “ But your knight, your 
defender, your hero with the golden nightingale in his throat ? 
Are you as cold to him? Did you not see that while he sang ilia 
heart was breaking, and he would have been glad if his song had 
been a sword?” 

They were imprudent words, and she knew it, yet she could 
not resist the utterance of them, for even in her admiration of 
Vere a certain bitterness and a certain impatience moved her 
against a grandeur of principle that appeared to her strained and 
out of nature. 

Yere, who was sitting leaning a little back against the sea-wall, 
raised herself and sat erect. A warmth of color came upon her 
face, her eyes grew angered and luminous. 

“I will not affect to misunderstand you,” she said, tranquilly, 
“but you misunderstand both him and me. Long, long ago, 3 
think, he could have loved me, and I — could have loved him. 
But fate had it otherwise. He is my knight, you say; perhaps, 
but only as they were knights in days of old, without hope and 
without shame. I think you had no need to say this to me, and, 
perhaps, no right to say it.” 

The Princess Nadine touched her hand reverently. “ No, I had 
no right, Vera. But I thank you for answering me so. Dear, 
you are not of our world. You live in it, but it does not touch 
you. Your future is dark, but you bear the lamp of honor in 
your hand. We think the light old-fashioned and dull, but it 
burns in dark places where we, without it, stumble and fall. 
Correze did not sing in vain; my brother, I think, will say no 
more to you of the sables and the Promenade des Anglais.” 

“ It matters very little whether he does or not,” said Vere. “ I 
should not drive there, and he knows it. Will you be so good as 
not to speak again of these things? I think words only make 
them harder to bear, and seem to lower one to the level of the 
w omen who complain.” 

“ But to speak is so natural ” 

“ Not to me.” 

It was three o’clock in the December day; the mistral was 
blowing, although in this sheltered nook of the Gulf of Villas 
franca it was but little felt, the sky was overcast, the waves 
were rolling in heavy with surf, little boats, going on their way 
to Sans Soupir or Saint Jean, plowed through deep waters. 

Vere moved towards the house. 

Madame Nelaguine went down towards the garden to visit the 
young palms ehe was rearing for the palace in the Newski Pros- 
pect, where heated air was to replace the lost south to them, as 
the fever of society replaces the dreams of our youth. 

Her husband met Vere in the entrance and stopped her there* 
his face was reddened and dark! his heavy jaw had the look of 
the bull-dog's: his eyes had a furtive and ferocious glance; it 


MOTHS . 


291 


was the first time they had met since she had courtseyed to him 
her good-night. He barred her way into the entrance-chamber. 

“Madame, the horset are ready,” he said, curtly; “ go in and 
put on your sables.” 

She lifted her eyes, and a great contempt spoke in them; with 
her lips she was silent. 

“Do you hear me?” he repeated. “Go in and put on your 
sables; I am waiting to drive with* you.” 

“Along the Promenade des Anglais?” she said, very calmly. 

“ On the Promenade des Anglais,” repeated Zouroff. “ Do you 
need twice telling?” 

“Though you tell me a hundred times, I will not drive there.” 

He swore a great oath. 

“I told you what you were to do last night. Last night you 
chose to have me insulted by an opera singer; do you suppose 
that changed my resolve? When I say a thing, it is done. Go in 
and put on your sables.” 

“ I will never put them on again; and I will not drive with 
you!” 

Rage held him speechless for a moment. Then he swore a 
great oath. 

“Go in and put on your sables, or I will teach you how a 
Russian can punish rebellion. You insulted me by the mouth of 
an opera-singer, who had your orders, no doubt, what to sing. 
You shall eat dust to-day; that I swear.” 

Yere made a little gesture of disdain. 

“ Do you think you can terrify me?” she said tranquilly. “We 
had better not begin to measure insults. My account against 
you is too heavy to be evenly balanced on that score.” 

The calmness of her tone and of her attitude lashed him to 
fury. 

“ By God! I will beat you as my father did his serfs!” he mut 
tered, savagely, as he seized her by the arm. 

“You can do so if you choose. The Tsar has not enfranchised 
me. But make me drive as you say, where you say — that is be- 
yond your power.” 

She stood facing him on the terrace, the angry sea and clouded 
sky beyond her. Her simple dignity of attitude impressed him 
for an instant with shame and with respect; but his soul was set 
on enforcing his command. She had had -him humiliated by the 
mouth of a singer; and he was resolved to avenge the humiliation; 
and, having said this thing, though he was ashamed of it, he would 
not yield or change. 

He pulled her towards him by both hands, and made her stand 
before him. 

“You shall learn all that my power means, madame. I am 
your master; do you deny me obedience?” 

“In things that are right, no.” 

“ Right— wrong! What imbecile’s words are those? 1 bid vou 
do what I choose. You insulted me by your singer’s mouth last 
night; I will make you eat dust to-day,” 

vere looked him full in the face. 
t said we had better not measure insults; I have had too 


292 


MOTHS. 


many to count them, but at’ last they may pass one’s patience; 
yours Knave passed mine.” 

“Body of Christ!” he cried, savagely, ‘‘what were you? Did 
I not buy you? What better are you than that other woman .who 
has my sables, except that I bought up at a higher cost? Have 
you never thought of that? You high-born virgiims who are offered 
up for gold, how are you ®o much nobler and higher that the 
jolies impures whom you pretend 'to despise?” 

‘‘I have thought of it every day and night since I was made 
your wife. But you know very well that I did not marry you 
for either rank or riches, neither for any purpose of my own.” 
“No? For what did you then?” 

Vere’s voice sank very low, so low that the sound of the sea 
almost drowned it. 

“To save my mother; you know that.” 

The face of her husband changed, and he let go his hold of 
her wrists. 

“What did she tell you?” he muttered; “what did she tell 
you?” 

“She told mie she was in your debt; that she could not pay you; 
that you had letters of hers to some one — she did not say to 
whom— (that placed her in your power, and you had threatened 

to use your power unless I But you must know all that 

very well; better than I do. It seemed to me right to sacrifice 
myself; now I would not do it; but then I was such a child, and 

she prayed to me in my father’s name ” 

She paused suddenly, for Zouroff laughed aloud, a terrible 
jarring laugh', that seemed to hurt the peace and silence around. 

“What a liar! what a liar always!” he muttered, “and with it 
all how pretty, and empty-headed, and harmless She looks— 
MMadi Dolly!” 

Then he laughed again. 

“Was it not true?” said Vere. 

A great cold and a great sickness came 'over her; the look 
upon her husband’s face frightened her as his rage had had no 
power to do. 

“True, whs what true?” 

“That she was in your power.” 

His eyes did not meet hers. 

“Yes^-no. She had had plenty of my money, but that was 
tio matter,” he answered her in a strange forced voice, “but 
she — she had paid me; there was no cause to frighten you.” 

Then he laughed again, a dissonant cruel laugh, that hurt his 
wife more than the bruise he had left upon her wrists. 

“Was it not true?” she muttered again, wearily; she trembled 
a little. 

“Be quiet!” said her husband, roughly, with the color passing 
over his face again like a hot wind. “Do not talk of it; do not 
think of it; she wished you to marry me, and she has — well, in 
a sense she wais afraid, and wished to muzzle me. Ah! those 
dainty ladies! and they think to meet the lionnea in the Passage 
des Anglais is pollution!” 

Then he laughed yet again. 


MOTHS . 28& 

Vere felt a faintness steal over her; she felt terror — she knew 
not of what nor why. 

if Then my mother deceived me!” 

His eyes looked at her strangely in a fleeting glance. 

“ Yes, she deceived you,” he said, briefly. “ In a sense she was 
afraid of me; but not so — not so.” 

His dark brows frowned, and his face grew very troubled and 
full of a dusky red of shame. Yere was mute. 

“ It is of no use speaking of it now; your mother never could 
be true to any one. I am — sorry,” he said, with an eflort. “ You 
were misled; but it is of no use now — it is too late. Give the 
sables to the first beggar you meet. That damned singer was 
right last night; you are a cup of gold, and I — like best the 
trough where the swine drink!” 

Vere stood motionless and mute; a vague terror of some un- 
known thing unnerved her and paralyzed her dauntless courage, 
her proud tranquillity; she felt that for her mother this man who 
was before her had a scorn as boundless as any he could feel for 
the basest creatures of the world; and for once*she was a coward, 
for once she dared not ask the truth. 

Zouroff stood still a moment, looked at her wistfully, then 
bowed to her with deep respect, and turned away in silence. A 
little while later he was driving rapidly through Eza to the Casino 
of Monte Carlo. 

Hi3 sister came to Vere anxiously as she saw his horses drive 
away. 

“ I hope he was not violent, mv dear?” 

“ No.* 

“ And he did not speak of your driving on that road?” 

“ He did not enforce it.” 

Vere spoke feebly; her teeth chattered a little, as with cold; 
she had sat down by the balustrade of the terrace, and had a 
stupefied look, like the look of some one who has had a blow or 
fall. 

“I am thankful my children died at their birth,” she said, 
after some moments, in a voice so low that it scarcely stirred 
the air. 

Then she got up, drew a shawl about her, and went once more 
toward the house. A great darkness was upon her: she felt as 
in the Greek tragedies which she had read in her childhood those 
felt who were pursued, innocent, yet doomed, by the Furies for 
their mothers’ sins. 

Meanwhile her husband was driving against the hot southeast 
wind across the Place du Palais of Monaco. 

He was thinking: “ The quadroon is a beast of prey, but she is 
honesty itself beside half the women in society, the delicate, 
dainty dames that we flirt with in the ball-room alcoves, and lift 
our hats to as they go by in the parks !” 

A little while later he went up the steps of the great temple of 
Hazard. He met the mother of Vere coming out between tin 
columns from the vestibule; it w^as sunset; she had been playing 
since three o’clock, and had amused herself, she had won a thou- 
sand francs or so; she was going home to dinner contented ar.d 


MOTHS : 


m 

diverted. She was still staying with her friends at the villa ot 
La Condamine. She looked like a little Dresden figure: she had 
a good deal of pale rose and golden brown in her dress, she had 
a knot of pink roses in her hand, and had above her head a large 
pink sunshade. Casse-une-Croute had been playing very near her 
at the table, but Lady Dolly did not mind these accidents: she 
was not supposed to know Casse-une-Crouteby sight from any 
other unrecognizable person among the pilgrims of pleasure. 

“ The ponies are waiting for you, madame,” said her son-in- 
law, as he met her and took her from her little attendant group 
of young men, and sauntered on by her side down the marble 
stairs. 

There was a gorgeous sunset over sea and sky, the thickets of 
camellias were all in gorgeous blossom, the odorous trees and 
shrubs filled the air with perfume, some music of Ambroise 
Thomas was floating on the air in sweet distant strains, throngs 
of gay people were passing up and down, the great glittering pile 
rose above them like a temple of Moorish art. 

“I have won a thousand francs: quel boriheur!” cried Lady 
Dolly. 

“ Quel bonheur!” repeated Zouroff. “ I suppose that sunshade 
did not cost much more ?” 

“Not half as much,” said Lady Dolly, seriously; “ these stones 
in the handle are only Ceylon garnets.” 

Zouroff did not look at her. His face was flushed and gloomy. 
He turned a little aside at the foot of the steps into one of the 
winding walks, and motioned to a marble bench. “ Will you sit 
there a moment? the ponies can wait; I want to say a word ttf 
you that is better said here.” 

Lady Dolly put her bouquet of roses to her lips and fell 
annoyed. “ When people want to speak to one, it is never to 
say any thing agreeable,” she thought to herself; “and he looks 
angry. Perhaps it is because that Casse-une-Croute was at my 
elbow; but I shall not say anything to Vere. I never make mis- 
chief; he must surely know that.” 

“ Why did you induce your daughter to marry me by false 
representations?” said Zouroff, abruptly. 

“ False what?” echoed Lady Dolly, vaguely. 

“ You deceived me, and you deceived her,” said Zouroff. 

Lady Dolly laughed nervously. “ Deceived! what a very low, 
hysterical sort of word! and what nonsense!” 

“You deceived her,” he repeated, “and you cannot deny it. 
You told her nothing of the truth.” 

“The truth?” said Lady Dolly, growing very pale, and with a 
nervous contraction of the corners of her mouth, “Whoever 
does tell the truth? I don’t know anybody ” 

“ Of course you could not tell it her,” said Zouroff, who also 
had grown pale; “ but you forced her to your purpose with a 
lie: that was perhaps worse. You know very well that I would 
not have had her driven to me so; you know very well that I 
supposed her bought by ambition like any other. You did a 
vile thing ” 

“You turned preacher!” said Lady Dolly, with a little shrill 


MOTHS . 


295 


angry laugh; “that is really too funny; and you are speaking 
not too politely. You sought Vere’s hand, I gave it you; I really 
do not know ” 

“But I never bade you force her to me by a lie! You never 
feared me; you — you were no more in fear of me than of half a 
score of others. Besides, you know very well that no man who 
who is not a cur ever speaks ” 

“I was afraid; I thought you wonld be furious unless she 
married you; when men are angry,, then they speak; how 
could I tell? You wished that thing, you had it; you are very 
Ungrateful and she too.” 

Lady Dolly had recovered herself; she had regained that 
effrontery which was her equivalent for courage, she had no con- 
science, and she did not see that she had done so much that was 
wrong. After all, what was a sin? — it was an idea. In her way 
she was very daring. She would kneel at the flower-services and 
weep at the Lenten ones, but she did not believe a word of all her 
pravers and penance; they looked well, so she did them; that 
was all. 

'For the moment she had been frightened, but she was no longer 
frightened. What could he do, what could he say? When she 
could not be punished for it, guilt of any sort lay very lightly on 
her head. She knew that he was powerless, and she "lost the fear 
with which the strong rough temper of Sergius Zouroff had often 
teally moved her in an earlier time. 

The contraction at the corners of her mouth still remained and 
quivered a little, but she recovered all her coolness and all that 
petulant impudence which was perhaps the most serviceable of 
all her qualities. 

“ You are very rude,” she said, “and you are very thankless. 
You are a very faithless husband, and I know everything, and I 
say nothing, and I come and stay in your house, and you ought 
to thank me; yes, you ought to thank me. I do not know what 
you mean when you say I used force with my daughter; you 
could see very well she detested you, and yet you chose to insist: 
whose fault was that? You have been generous, I do not deny 
that, but then you are just as much so to creatures — more so! 
I think you have spoken to me abominably; I am not used to 
that sort of language; I do not like being rebuked when I have 
always acted for the best, if the results did not repay me my 
sacrifices. As for your imagining I wanted so very much to 
marry Vere to you, I can assure you I need not have done so; I 
could have married her at that very same time to Jura if I had 
chosen.” 

“To Jura?” 

Zouroff looked at her, then burst into a bitter laughter that 
was more savage than any of his oaths. 

“You are an extraordinary woman !” he said, with a little short 
laugh. 

“I don’t know why you should say that,” said Lady Dolly; 
“I am sure I am exactly like everybody else ; I hate singularity, 
there is nothing on earth so vulgar ; I do not know what ever X 
Lave done to d^ser^e the insult of being called ‘extraordinary/ 


m 


MOTHS. 


I hate people who drive at things, I always detest conundrutos 
and acrostics ; perhaps I am too stupid for thorn ; I would rather 
be stupid than extraordinary : it is less voyant .” 

He stared down on her gloomily for a while, while the laugh 
rattled in his throat with a cynical sound that hurt her nerves. 

“You are a wonderful woman, Miladi. I never did you justice. 
I see,” he said curtly. “Zola will want a lower deep before long, 
I suppose , he will do well to leave his cellars for the drawing- 
rooms.” 

“ What do you mean?” said Lady Dolly, opening innocent eyes 
of surprise. 

Zouroff paced slowly by her side; he was silent for some mo- 
ments, then he said, abruptly — 

“Pardon me if I do not ask you to return to my house. 
You and your daughter should not be sheltered by the same 
roof.” 

Lady Dolly’s pretty teeth gnawed her under lip to keep in her 
fury ; she could not rebuke and she dared not resent it. 

“ We had better not quarrel,” she said, feebly; “ people would 
talk so terribly.” 

Of course we will not quarrel,” said her son-in-law, with his 
cynical smile; “ who ever does quarrel in our world? Only — you 
understand that I mean what I say.” 

“I am sure I understand nothing that you mean to-day,” said 
Lady Dolly, with a little, feeble, flitting laugh. 

Then in unbroken silence they went to where the ponies 
waited. 

“ You are too cruel to us not to return,” said Zouroff, publicly, 
for the sake of the world’s wide-open ears, as she went to her car- 
riage on his arm, 

“I cannot stand your mistral,” said Lady Dolly, also for the 
world, and, in his ear, added, with an injured sweetness, “and I 
do not like reproaches, and I never deserve them.” 

Lady Dolly drove home to La Condamine, where she was stay- 
ing with the Marquise Pichegru, and, when she was all alone 
behind the ponies, shuddered a little, and turned sick, and felt 
for a moment as if the leaden hand of a dark guilt lay on her 
conscience; her nerves had been shaken, though she had kept so 
calm a front, so cool a smile; she had been a coward, and she had 
sacrificed the child of her dead husband because in her cowardice 
she had feared the resurrection to her hurt of her own bygone 
sins, but she had never thought of herself as a wicked woman. 
In her frothy world there is no such thing as wickedness, there is 
only exposure, and the dread of it, which passes for virtue. 

She lived, like all women of her stamp and her epoch, in an 
atmosphere of sugared sophisms; she never reflected, she never 
admitted that she did wrong; in her world nothing mattered 
much, unless, indeed, it were found out and got into the public 
mouth. 

Shifting as the sands, shallow as the rain-pools, drifting in all 
danger to a lie, incapable of loyalty, insatiably curious, still as a 
friend and ill as a foe, kissing like Judas, denying like Peter, 
impure of thought, even where bv physical bias or politic pru* 


I 


MOTHS . 


297 


dence still pure in act, the woman of modern society is too often 
at once the feeblest and the foulest outcome of a false civilization. 
Useless as a butterfly, corrupt as a canker; untrue to even lovers 
and friends, because mentally incapable of comprehending what 
truth means; caring only for physical comfort and mental in- 
clination; tired of living, but afraid of dying; believing some in 
priests and some in physiologists, but none at all in virtue; sent to 
sleep by chloral, kept awake by strong waters and raw meat; 
bored at twenty, and exhausted at thirty, yet dying in the har- 
ness of pleasure rather than drop out of the race and live natu- 
rally; pricking their sated senses with the spur of lust and fan- 
cying it love; taking their passions as they take absinthe before 
dinner; false in everything, from the swell of their breast 
to the curls at their throat — beside them the guilty and tragic 
figures of old, the Medea, the Clvtemnestra, the Phaedra., look 
almost pure, seem almost noble. 

When one thinks that they are only the shape of womanhood 
that comes hourly before so many men, one comprehends why 
the old Christianity that made womanhood sacred dies out day 
by day, and why the new Positivism, which w T ould make her di- 
vine, can find no lasting roost. 

The faith of men can only live by the purity of women, and 
there is both impurity and feebleness at the core of the dolls of 
Worth, as the canker of the red phylloxera works at the root of 
the vine. 

But there is “no harm ” in them, that is the formula of society; 
there is “no harm” in them; they have never been found out, 
and they are altogether unconscious of any guilt. 

They believe they have a conscience, as they know they have 
a liver; but the liver troubles them sometimes, the conscience is 
only a word. 

Lady Dolly had been a very guilty woman, but she never 
thought so. Perhaps in real truth the shallow-hearted are never 
really guilty. “ They know not what they cio ” is a plea of mercy 
which they perchance deserve even no less than they need it. 

A day or two later she made some excuse and left the Riviera. 

“ After all,” she thought to herself, as the train ran into the 
heart of the rocks, and the palm-trees of Monte Carlo ceased to 
lift their plumes against the sky, “after all, it was quite true 
what I did tell her. I used to be horribly afraid of him, he can 
be such a brute. I never was really at ease till I saw my letters 
on the back of the fire; now he can sulk, he can rage, he can 
quarrel with me if he choose, but he never can do me any harm. 
If he be ever so unpleasant about me, people will only laugh and 
say that a man always hates his wife’s mother, and I really am 
Yere’s mother, odd as it seems; I think I look quite as young as 
she does; it is such a mistake, she will never paint, she puts ten 
years on to herself.” 

Then she took the little glass out of her traveling-bag, and looked 
at her face; it was pretty, with soft curls touching the eyebrows 
under a black saucer of a hat with golden-colored feathers; she 
had a yellow rose at her throat, linked into her raccoon fur; she 
was satisfied with what she saw in the mirror; when she got into 


MOTHS . 


m 

her train she found a charming young man that she knew a lit- 
tle going the same way, and she gave him a seat in her coupe 
and flirted pleasantly all the way to Lyons. 

“What a mistake it is to take life au grand serieux F she 
thought. “Now, if poor Yere was not so tragic I think she 
might be the happiest woman in the world, still.” 

But then Yere could not have flirted with a chance young man 
in a coupe, and given him a yellow rose with the whisper of a 
half-promised rendezvous as they parted. These are the capabil- 
ities that make happy women. 


CHAPTER XXIV. 

In the house on the Gulf of Villafranca a heavy gloom reigned. 

Life ran the same course as usual, society came and went, peo- 
ple laughed and talked, guests were gathered and were dispersed, 
but there was a shadow in the house that even the ceremonies 
and frivolities of daily custom could not altogether hide or dis- 
sipate. Sergius Zouroff was taciturn and quarrelsome, and it 
taxed all the resources of his sister’s tact and wit and worldly 
wisdom to repair the harm and cover the constraint produced by 
his captious and moody discourtesies. To his wife he said noth- 
ing. 

Except the conventional phrases that society in the presence of 
servants necessitated, Zouroff preserved an unbroken silence to 
her; he was gloomy, but taciturn; now and then under his bent 
brows his eyes watched her furtively. This forbearance was only 
a lull in the storm, such a peace as came over the gulf beneath 
her windows after storm, when the waves sank for an hour at 
noon to rise in redoubled fury and send the breakers over the 
quay at sunrise. As for her the golden cup was now full, but 
was full with tears. 

Would she have had it empty? 

She was not sure. 

The echo of that one song seemed always on her ear; in the 
dreams of her troubled Asleep she murmured its words; the singer 
seemed to her transfigured, as to a woman bound in martyrdom, 
in days of old, seemed the saint with sword and palm that rode 
through fiery heats and living walls of steel to release her from 
the stake or wheel. “ The woman in Calvados called him the 
Angel Raphael,” she thought, with dim eyes. 

It was still midwinter when Sergius Zouroff. several weeks be- 
fore his usual time, abruptly left the villa of Villafranca and 
went with his wife and sister to his hotel in Paris. Zouroff had 
taken a bitter hatred to this place, where the only reproof he had 
ever endured, the only challenge he had ever received, had been 
cast at him publicly and in such wise that he could not resent or 
avenge it. When he drove through the streets of Monaco or the 
streets of Nice, he thought he saw on every face a laugh ; when 
he was saluted by his numerous acquaintances, he heard in the 
simplest greeting a sound of ridicule , when a song was hummed 
in the open air, he fancied it was the song of the Coup d’Or. In 
impatience and anger he took his household to Paris. 


MOTHS. 


299 


A great emotion, a sort of fear, came upon Vere as she once 
more saw the walls of her house in Paris. 

For in Paris was Correze, 

In the honor and loyalty of her soul it seemed to her that she 
ought never to see his face or hear his voice again. She would 
have been willing, could, she have chosen, to go far away from 
all the luxuries and homage of the world, to be buried in humility 
and obscurity, laboring for God and man, and bearing always in 
her memory that song which had been raised like a sword in her 
defense. 

When at the end of the long cold journey— long and cold, de- 
spite all that wealth could do to abridge and luxury to rob it of 
its terrors— she saw the pale January light of a Paris morning 
shine on the “ Slave ” of Gerome in her bedchamber, on the table 
beneath the picture was a great bouquet of roses; with the roses 
was a little sprig of sweet-brier^ 

To be in leaf in the winter she knew that the little homely 
cottage plant must have had the care of hothouse science. She 
did not need to ask who had sent her that welcome once more. 

She bent her face down on the roses, and her eyes were wet. 
Then she put them away, and fell on her knees, and prayed the 
old simple prayer — simple and homely as the sweet-brier — to be 
delivered from evil. 

At the same time her husband, who had driven not to his own 
house but straight to the Faubourg Saint-Germain, was standing 
amidst the gay chinoiseries of the Duchesse Jeanne’s famous 
boudoir. The duchess was laughing and screaming; he was 
looking down with bent brows. 

“ Oh, can you think for a moment the story is not known to 
all Paris?” she was crying. “ How could you — how could you— 
with a hundred people there to hear? My dear, it was only I 
who kept it out of ‘ Figaro.’ Such a lovely story as it was, and of 
course they made it still better. My dear, how stupid you are!— 
blind as a bat, as a mole! To be sure, we are all dying now to 
see the first signs of your conversion. How will you begin 
Will you go to church? "will you drive your mother-in-law round 
the lake? mil you take an oath never to enter a cafe? Do tell me 
how you mean to begin your reformation. It will be the drollest 
thing of the year!” 

“ 11 vons plait de plciisanter,” said her visitor, stiffly, between 
his shut teeth. 

When he left the Hotel de Sonnaz, the half-formed resolution 
which he had made to be less unworthy of his wife had faded 
away; he felt galled, stung, infuriated. Casse-une-Croute, and 
the other companions of his licentious hours, found him sullen, 
fierce, moody. When they rallied him, he turned on them sav- 
agely, and made them feel that, though he had chosen to toy 
with them and let them stuff themselves with his gold, he was 
their master and their purchaser — a tyrant that it was dangerous 
to beard, a lion with whom it was death to play. 

There was strength in his character, though it had been wasted 
in excesses of all kinds and in a life of utter selfishness and self* 
indulgence; and this strength left in him a certain manliness 


300 


MOTHS. 


that even his modes of life and all his base habits could not utter- 
ly destroy; and that latent manliness made him yield a sullen re* 
epect to the courageousness amd unselfishness of the woman who 
was his wife and his princess before the world, but in fact had 
been the victim of his tyrannies and the martyr of his lusts. 

There were times when he would have liked to say to her, 
“ Forgive me, and pray for me.” But his pride witheld him, and 
his cynical temper made him sneer at himself. He -dreaded ridi- 
cule. It was the only dread that was on him. He could not en- 
dure that his world should laugh: so, uniting more display and 
effrontery than ever, he paraded his vices before that world and 
all the while hated the panderers to them and the associates of 
them. He thought that if he lived more decently the whole of 
Europe would make a mock of it and say that he had been re- 
formed by the rebukes of Correze. So he showed himself abroad 
with the verves epais dm cabaret brutal, though they grew loath- 
some to him, and revenged himself on them by crushing their 
coarse frail worthlessness with savage harshness. 

Yere could not tell the strange sort of remorse which moved 
him. She saw herself daily and hourly insulted, and bore it as 
she had done before. So long as he asked no public degradation 
of herself, like that which he had commanded on the Promenade 
des Anglais, she was passive 1 and content, with that joyless and 
mournful contentment which is merely the absence of greater 
evils. 

Although they met only in society, there was a sort of timidity 
*n the manner of Sergius Zouroff to his wife, a gentleness and a 
homage in his tone, when he addressed her. Yere, who shrank 
from him rather more than less, did not perceive it, but all 
others did. “ Will Zouroff end with being in love with his wife?” 
his friends said, with a laugh. The Duch esse Jeanne heard it said 
on all sides of her. “Will he be a good husband, after all?” she 
thought, angrily; and her vanity rose in alarm, like the quills of 
the bruised porcupine. 

She attempted a jest or two with him, but they fell flat; there 
came an anxious sparkle in his gloomy eyes that warned her of 
such witticisms. She was perplexed and irritated. “After all, 
it will be very diverting if you should end as le mart amoureuxf > 
she could not resist saying at hazard one day. Zouroff looked 
round, and his face was very grave. 

“Let me alone. I can be dangerous: you know that. No, I 
am not in love with my wife: one is not in love with marble, 
however beautiful the lines of it. But I respect her. It is very 
odd for me to feel respect for any woman. It is new to me.” 

“ It is a very creditable emotion,” said the duchess, with a lit- 
tle sneer. “ But it is rather a dull sentiment, is it not?” 

“ Perhaps,” said Zouroff, gloomily. 

A sort of uneasiness and anxiety was upon him. Something 
of the feeling that had touched him for the child Yere at Felic- 
ite moved him once more before his wife; not passion in any 
way, but more nearly tenderness than it had ever been in his 
nature to feel for any living thing. He had always thought that 
he had bought her as he had bought the others, only par Id 


MOTHS 


801 


chemin de la chapelle, and he had had a scorn for her that had 
spoiled and marred his thoughts of her. Now that he knew her 
to be the martyr of her mother’s schemes, a pity that was full of 
honor rose up in him. After all, she was so innocent herself, 
and he had hurt her so grossly — hurt her with an injury that 
neither sophistry nor gold could make the less. 

He was a coarse and brutal man; he had had his own will from 
childhood upon men and women, slaves and animals. He was 
cruel with the unthinking, unmeasured cruelty of long self- 
indulgence; but he was a gentleman in certain instincts, despite 
all, and the manhood in him made him feel a traitor before Vere. 
A kind of reverence that was almost fear came into him before 
her; he seemed to himself unworthy to cross the threshold of her 
room. 

The leopard cannot change his spots, nor the Ethiopian his 
skin, nor could he abandon habits and vices ingrained in all the 
fiber of his being; but he began to feel himself as unfit for his 
wife’s young life as a murderer to taste the Eucharist. She 
could not imagine anything of the thoughts and the remorse that 
moved him. She only saw that he left her alone and ceased to 
vent his tyrannies upon her. She was thankful. The hours and 
the weeks that passed without her seeing him were the most 
peaceful days of her life. When he addressed her with gentle- 
ness she was alarmed: she was more afraid of his caresses than 
of his curses. He saw this fear in her, and a vague, half-sullen 
sadness began to enter into him. He began to understand that 
he owned this woman body and soul, and yet was further from 
her than any other creature, because no other had outraged her 
so deeply as he had done. 

He was a man who heeded his sins not at all, and even of 
crime thought little; he had the absolute disbelief and the pro- 
found moral indifference of his century; but his offenses against 
Vere he had been made to feel, and it rendered him in her pres- 
ence almost timid, and in her absence almost faithful. He had 
gathered the edelweiss, and he knew that his love was only fit 
for the brambles and poison-berries. 

The season passed away wearily to Vere. An intense pain and 
a vague terror were always with her. She went out into the 
world as usual, but it seemed to her more than ever [the most 
monotonous, as it was the most costly, way of destroying time. 
She was in her tribune at Chantilly, in her carriage in the Bois, 
in her diamonds at embassies, and she received that homage 
which a woman of her loveliness and her position is always sur- 
rounded by, however indifferent be her mood or unwilling her 
ear. 

But the whole life seemed to her more than ever a disease, a 
fever, a strained and unwholesome folly. She strove more and 
more to escape from it and from herself by labor amidst the poor 
and tenderness for them. 

“You should be canonized, Vere,” said her sister-in-law to her, 
with a little cynical impatience ; to her brother, Madame Nela- 
guine said with moist eyes. 

“Sergius, one day you will see red and white roses of Para* 


802 MOTHS. 

$ise in your wife’s lap, as her r.usband did in Saint Eliza 
beth’s.” 

Zouroff was silent, 

“ Alas ! alas ! the age o£ miracles is past, 5 ' thought his sister 
“ Good works bring their own fruits to those capable of them 
in peace of mind and innocence of soul, thaT I believe but the 
world has ceased to adore ; the very priests have ceased to u.i> 
lieve ; the ways of sin are not death, but triumph , and the pool 
do not love the hand that feeds them; they snatch and tear then 
snarl and bite, like a street cur. Alas ! ala3 * ou sont neiges 
cT anian /” 

Meanwhile her mother Vere did not see at that time She 
was thankful. 

Lady Dolly was one of the five hundred leaders of English so- 
ciety, and could not leave her duties. She was more popular 
than ever before. Her balls were the prettiest of the year and 
people could breathe at them; she was exclusive, yet always 
amiable ; she knew how to unite a social severity with a charm- 
ing good nature ; she began to call herself old with the merriest 
little laugh in the world, and she began to doubt whether she 
still ought to dance. “A dear httie woman,’ said the world; 
and every one pitied her for having a daughter who was cold, 
who was austere, and who had so little affection for her. 

“My Vere does not love me. It comes from my own fault, 
no doubt, in letting her be away from me in her childhood,” said 
Lady Dolly, softly, to her intimate friends; and her eyes were 
dim and her voicq pathetic. 

There were only two persons who did not believe in her in all 
her London world. These were a rough, gloomy, yet good- 
natured man, who was no longer Lord Jura, but Lord Shetland ; 
and Fuschia, Duchess of Mull. 

“ Guess she’s all molasses,” said her Grace, who in moments of 
ease returned to her vernacular, “ but, my word, ain’t there wasps 
at the bottom.” 

“ After all, poor little pussie is not the simpleton 1 thought 
her,” mused Lady Stoat of Stitchley, with a sigh of envy; for her 
own unerring wisdom and exquisite tact and prudence had not 
been able to avert exposure and scandal from her own daughter, 
who was living with a French actor in Italy, while Lord Birken 
stead was drinking himself to death on brandy. 

A few days after their arrival, Correze had left Paris. For the 
first time in his life, he had refused to play in Paris on his ar- 
rival from the South, and had signed a four months’ engagement 
with Vienna and Berlin. “ They will say you are afraid to meet 
Prince Zouroff,” said an old friend to him. They may say it if 
they please,” answered Correze, wearily, and with a movement 
of disdain. 

He knew that his indignation and his disguise had carried him 
into an imprudence, an imprudence that he regretted now that 
the story of the Coupe d’Or had flown through society — regret- 
ted it lest it should annoy or compromise her; and for her sake 
he would not stay where she was. 

He knew how the tongues of the world wagged with or with- 


MOTES. 


303 


out reason at a mere whisper, and he knew that there were many 
who would rejoice to see the pure, cold, snow-white purity of 
Vere’s name fall into the mud of calumny — rejoice out of sheer 
wantonness, mere purposeless malice, mere love of a new sensa- 
tion. “ Blessed are the pure in heart,” says the Evangelist; but 
society says it not with liim . 

He loved her; but it was an emotion no more akin to the noble, 
tender, and self-denying love of other days than to the shallow 
sensualities of his own. 

He had been satiated with intrigue, surfeited with passion, 
underlying the capriciousness of a popular idol and the ardor of 
an amorous temper there were the patience and the loyalty of 
the mountaineers heart in him. Whosoever has truly loved the 
Alpine heights in early youth keeps something of their force and 
something of their freshness and their chastity in his soul al- 
ways. Correze was an artist and a man of the world; but he 
had been first and was still, under all else, a child of nature; and 
he would utterly deny that nature was the foul thing that it is 
now painted by those who call themselves realists. He denied 
thafc a drunkard and a prostitute are all who are real in the 
world. 

“ When the soldier dies at his post, unhonored and unpitied, 
and out of sheer duty, is that unreal because it is noble?” he 
said, one night, to his companions. ‘‘When the Sister of 
Charity hides her youth and her sex under a gray shroud, and 
gives up her whole life to woe and solitude, to sickness and pain, 
is that unreal because it is wonderful? A man paints a splutter- 
ing «andle, a greasy cloth, a moldy cheese, a pewter can; ‘ how 
real!’ they cry. If he paint the spirituality of dawn, the light 
of the summer sea, the flame of Arctic nights, of tropic woods, 
they are called unreal, though they exist no less than the candle 
and the cloth, the cheese and the can. Ruv Bias is now con- 
demned as unreal because the lovers kill themselves; the realists 
forget that there are lovers still to whom that death would be 
possible, would be preferable to low intrigue and yet more lower- 
ing falsehood. They can only see the moldy cheese; they cam 
not see the sunrise glory. Ali that is heroic, all that is sublime, 
impersonal, or glorious, is derided as unreal. It is a dreary creed, 
It will make a dreary world. Is not my Venetian glass, with its 
iridescent hues of opal, as real ever}' whit as your pot of pewter! 
Yet the time is coming when everyone, morally and mentally at, 
least, will be allowed no other than a pewter pot to drink out of, 
under pain of being ‘ writ down an ass ’ — or worse. It is a dreary 
prospect.” 

And he would not be content with it. There were the Ruy 
Bias and the Romeo in him, as there are in all men w ho aie ab 
once imaginative and ardent. He had the lover in him of South- 
ern lands, of older days. He would watch in long hours of cold 
midnight merely to see her image go by him; he would go down 
to the cliff on the Northern coast only to gather a spray of sweet- 
brier on the spot where he had seen her first; he would row in 
rough seas at dark under her villa wall in the Sout h for the sake 
of watching tlje light in he r casement; his love for her was a ro* ^ 


804 


MOTHS. 


ligion with him, simple, intense, and noble; it was an unending 
suffering, but it was a suffering he loved better than all his pre- 
vious joys. When he saw her husband in haunts of vicious pleas- 
ure, he could have strangled him for very shame that he was 
not worthier of her. When he saw him beside tne dusky face of 
the quadroon, he could have dragged him from his carriage aud 
hurled him under the feet of the wife he outraged. 

In one of the few days before his departure he passed Sergius 
Zouroff on the Boulevard des Italiennes. Correze stood still to 
let him speak if he would. Zouroff looked away, and walked on- 
ward without any sign, except of anger, from the sudden sullen 
gleam in his half -shut eyes. 

The arrogance of a man whose birth was higher, because his 
race had been greater, than the Romanoffs’, made it impossible 
for him to imagine that Correze could be his enemy or his rival. 

He thought the singer had only sung what had been com- 
manded him . He thought the rebuke to him had been his wife’s, 
and Correze only its mouth-piece. 

Still, he hated him; he avoided him; he would have liked to 
wring the throat of that silver- voiced nightingale. 

It cost Correze bitterly to do nothing, to go away, to go as if he 
were a coward; yet he did it, lest the world should speak of her — 
the light and cruel world to which nothing is sacred, which 
makes a joke of man’s dishonor and a jest of woman’s pain. 

He did it, and went and sang in the cities of the North with an 
aching heart? This is always the doom of the artist; the world 
has no pity. Its children must not pause to weep, nor go aside 
to pray. They must be always in the front, always exerting all 
their force and all their skill before their public, or they pass 
from remembrance and perish. The artist, when he loves, has 
two mistresses, each as inexorable as the other. 

Correze could not abandon his ari — would not abandon it, any 
more than a yearling child will leave its mother. It was all he 
had. It was a delight to him, that empire of sound that came 
of a perfect mastery, that consciousness and clearness of genius. 
Without the listening crowds, the glittering houses, the nights 
of triumph, he might have been only dull and lonely; but with- 
out the delight of melody, the command of that song which had 
gone with him all his life, as a nightingale’s goes with it till it 
dies, he would have been desolate. 

Therefore in the keen cold of the Northern winter and their 
tardy, niggard spring, he sang as the nightingale sings, even 
while its lover lies shot under the leaves; and the multitude and 
their leaders alike adored him. In Vienna the whole city saluted 
him as it salutes its Kaiser, and in the vast barrack of Berlin the 
blare of trumpets and the clash of arms were forgotten for one 
soft voice that sang under Gretchen’s cottage-window. 

“After all, when one has known this, one has known human 
greatness, surely,” he thought, wistfully, as he stood on his bal- 
cony in the keen starlight of Northern skies, and saw vast throngs 
fill the square beneath him and all the streets around, and heard 
the mighty hoch! that Northern lungs give for their emperora 
and their armies ring through the frosty air for him, 


MOTHS . 


305 


Yet a mist came over his eyes that obscured the torch-glare 
and the gathered multitudes and the buildings that were so white 
and so vast in the moonlight. He thought that he would have 
given all his triumphs, all his joys — nay, his very voice itself — 
to undo the thing that had been done, and make the wife of 
Sergius Zouroff once more the child by the sweet-brier hedge on 
the cliff. 

Though for all the world he was a magician, he had no sor- 
cery for himself. He was but a man, like all the others, and to 
himself he seemed weaker than all the rest. The bonds of the 
world bound him — the bonds of its conventions, of its calumnies, 
of its commonplaces. He could not strike a blow for her honor 
that the world would not construe to her shame. 

“ And who knows but that if she knew that I loved her she, 
too, might never forgive?” he thought, wearily; and the flowers 
flung to him through the frost seemed but weeds, the multitude 
fools, the rejoicing city a mad-house. 

When Fame stands by us all alone, she is an angel clad in light 
and strength; but when Love touches her she drops her sword 
and fades away, ghost-like and ashamed. 

But his sacrifice was of little use. There were too many 
women jealous of him, and envious of her, for the story of the 
Coupe d’Or not to be made the root and center of a million 
falsehoods. 

You may weep your eyes blind, you may shout your throat 
dry, you may deafen the ears of your world for half a lifetime, 
and you may never get a truth believed in, never have a simple 
fact accredited. But the he flies like the swallow, multiplies 
itself like the caterpillar, is accepted everywhere, like the visits 
of a king; it is a royal guest, for whom the gates fly open, the red 
carpet is unrolled, the trumpets sound, the crowds applaud. 

Jeanne de Sonnaz laughed a little, shrugged her shoulders, then 
said very prettily that every one knew there was nothing; Yere 
was a saint. And then the thing was done. 

Who said it first of all nobody ever knew. Who ever sees the 
snake spawn, the plague-mist gather? The snake-brood grows 
and comes out into the light, the plague-mist spreads and slays 
its thousands: that is enough to see. 

Who first whispered through the great world the names of the 
Princess Zouroff and the singer Correze together? No one could 
have told. All in a moment it seemed as if every one in society 
were murmuring, hinting, smiling, with that damnable smile 
with which the world always greets the approach of a foul 
idea. 

A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels 
as they run. 

“ An old love, an early love,” so they muttered; and the fans 
and the cigarettes made little breaks and waves in the air, as 
much as to say it was always so. You could say what you liked, 
they murmured: when people were so very cold, so very proud, 
so very proper, there was always some cause. An old love, ah? 
that was why she was so fond of music! Then society laughed 
its inane cruel chirping laughter. 


306 


MOTHS. 


She had many foes. When those calm, deep, disdainful eyes 
had looked through the souls of others; those other souls, so 
often mean and shameless with paltry lusts or swollen with 
paltry forms of pride, had shrunk under that glance and hated 
the one who all innocently gave it; when her serene simplicity 
and her grave grace had made the women around her look merely 
dolls of the Palais Royal toy-shops, and the fantastic frivolity of 
her epoch seem the silliest and rankest growth of an age in 
nothing over- wise, then, and for that alone, she had become be- 
set by enemies unseen and unsuspected, but none the less perilous 
for their secrecy. When women had called her farouche in their 
drawing-room jargon, they had only meant that she was chaste, 
chat she was grave, that folly did not charm her, and that she 
was a rebuke to themselves. That under the snow there should 
oe mud, that at the heart of the wild rose there should be not 
one worm, but many, that the edelweiss should be rotten and 
worthless after all — oh, joy! The imagined joy of angels over 
one who repents can never be one-thousandth part so sweet and 
strong as the actual joy of sinners over one purity that falls. 

So she had always been a falsehood, like them all! So Correze 
had always been iier lover! All the grand ladies and all the 
pretty ladies in the great world laughed gingerly, and tittered 
with that titter which in Mary Jane and Louison one would call 
vulgar, and in their nests of new knicknackery an old art cooed 
together and soothed one another’s ruffled plumage and agreed 
that they were none of them surprised. 

Meanwhile, Vere knew nothing, and went on her way with 
calm, proud feet, unwitting that among the ermine of her man- 
tle of innocence the moths of slander were at work. Who first 
said it? No one knew. Perhaps her own mother engendered it 
by a sigh. Perhaps her husband’s friend begot it by a smile. 
No one could ever tell. Only society talked. That was all. 
Society talked. It means as much as when in Borgia’s days they 
said, “ To-night the Pope sups with you.” 

Lady Dolly heard, as women like her hear everything. “Are 
they saying this? I always thought they would say it,” she 
thought, and was vaguely disquieted, and yet not ill pleased. 
When she had caught the first rumor of it one afternoon, in a 
whisper never meant for her ears, she had gone back to her dress- 
ing-room to get ready for a dinner at an embassy, and had been 
good nature itself to her maid, easily pleased with her curls, and 
quite indifferent as to what jewels they gave her. “ Anything 
looks well with white ” she had said, dreamily; and her maid 
thought she must have got another “ affair ” on the wind. But 
she was only feeling a sort of velvety content in the ultimate 
justice of things. “ She has been so cruel to me,” 3he thought— 
really, honestly thought it. “ She has always been so cold and 
so grave, and so very unpleasant, and always looked really as if 
one were no better than one should be: it would be very funny 
if she gets a few ‘ nasty ones,’ as the boys say, herself; it really 
will be no more than she deserves. And, besides, people don’t 
like that sort of manner, that sort of way she has with her eye- 
lids, as if one were something so very bad and <&ueer, if one just 


MOTHS. 


807 


happens to say the least little thing that she fancies not quite 
correct; nobody likes it, it is so very unsympathetic; women are 
<sur« to pay her out if they get the least chance, and men will be 
quite as delighted to hear it. It is such a mistake not to make 
yourself pleasant, not to be like everybody else and always amia- 
ble. Such heaps of people will always take your part if you have 
been amiable. I wonder if it is true? No, of course it isn’t true. 
I don’t believe Correze ever kissed the back of her hand. But it 
will be very funny if she should get talked about; very sad, but 
so funny, too!” 

And Lady Dolly’s mind drifted complacently and comfortably 
over a long series of years, in which she had skated on the very 
thinnest ice without ever getting a drenching, and had had all 
the four winds of heaven blowing “stories” about her like a 
scattered pack of cards, and yet had never been the worse for 
any one of them. “ It is because I have always been so pleasant 
to them all,” thought Lady Dolly, complacently; and, indeed, she 
always had been. 

She had said very ill-natured things when they were safe to be 
said; she had laughed at nearly everybody when their backs were 
turned; she had often amused herself with putting spokes in the 
wheels of happy marriages, of promising courtships, of social 
ambitions, of youthful careers; but she had done it all merely as 
a squirrel steals nuts, and she had always been pleasant to 
women, always kissed them, always caressed them, always con- 
fided, or always seemed to confide, in them, and, above all, had 
always made them think her both silly and successful — a uniou 
of the two most popular social qualities. “ Yere never would 
kiss any of them,” she thought, with the contempt that an old 
diplomatist feels for an obstinate politician who will not under- 
stand that language is given to us to conceal our thoughts, and 
she drew her gloves up to the elbow, and took her big fan, and 
went to her party with a complacent feeling of superiority and 
expectation. “ It would be very horrid, of course,” she thought, 
“ and of course it would be dreadful, if there were any scene; 
and I am not very sure what the Russian laws are if it were 
to come to any separation de corps et de Mens : but still if she 
were to get a fright one couldn’t altogether be sorry. It would 
teach her that she is made only of the same stuff as other 
people.” 

For, what with the many years of separation from her daugh- 
ter, and the sense of shame that perpetually haunted her for the 
sacrifice she had made of Yere’s fair life, Lady Dolly had almost 
grown to hate her. She was always envying, fearing, disliking 
the pale, cold, beautiful woman whose diamonds outshone her 
own as the sun outshines the lamps; Yere was not one tithe so 
much her dead husband’s child as she was the Princess Zouroff, 
and there were many times when Lady Dolly caught herself 
thinking of her only a3 the Princess Zouroff, as a, social rival and 
a social superior, and, as such, bating her and forgetting, quite 
forgetting, that she had ever been a little flower-like baby that 
had owed life to herself. “ Yere has been so cruel to me,” she 
would think, “ and so very unforgiving.” 


308 


MOTHS . 


Fop Lady Dolly, true woman of the times, always thought that 
those whom she had wronged were cruel to her. Why would 
they not forget? She herself could always forget. 

“ It shows such a bad disposition to resent and remember so 
long,” she would say to herself; life was too short for long 
memories. “Give me the art oblivion,” cried Themistocles; 
Lady Dolly had learned the art, or rather had had the power 
born in her, and forgot, as naturally as birds moult in autumn, 
her sins, her follies, her offenses, and her friends. 

Only one thing she never forgot, and that was a wound to her 
vanity; and no one ever looked at her when her daughter was 
nigh. 

Zouroff, who did not know “ society talked,” felt abashed before 
the presence of his wife; he felt as Louis of Hungary felt when 
he saw the celestial roses in the lap of that saintly queen to whom 
Madame Nelaguine compared Vere. 

Since the day when her mother’s name had been spoken be- 
tween them, he had never seen his wife alone one moment, and 
never had fairly met her glance. 

Yet when they were in the same room in society his eyes fol- 
lowed her as they had never done before, wistfully, somberly, 
wonderingly. Jeanne de Sonnaz said to herself, “ He will end 
as le marl amoureaux ,” and, so thinking, spoke to him one morn- 
ing early, when he was sitting in that little yellow boudoir, with 
all its Chinese idols and Chinese work, which was so curiously 
unlike all the rest of the dark old hotel of the Renaissance, which 
a Due de Sonnaz had built under Francis the First. With all her 
cleverest tact she brought uppermost the name of Correze, and 
dropped little hints, little suggestions, harmless yet pregnant, as 
she leaned back in her low chair, smoking a cigarette with her 
cup of coffee. 

Zouroff grew irritated at last, but he did not know how to ex- 
press his irritation without appearing absurd in her sight or pro- 
voking her laughter. 

“ My dear, you must be blind not to see there is some sentiment 
between Vera and this lyric Bossuet, who made your piano his 
pulpit,” she continued, as he muttered something not very in- 
telligible. “When he refused to come to Svir you might have 
known. What singer without a motive refuses a mountain of 
roubles? Besides, he was at Ischl. I did not tell you— why 
should I tell you? — but he serenaded her adorably, he climbed to 
impossible altitudes to get her flowers; he went away in the 
oddest, most abrupt fashion. My dear Sergius, you are a bat, a 
mole ” 

“ Pshaw I the man is only a mime, a mime with a thrush’s 
pipe,” said Zouroff, with rough scorn. “Do you suppose she 
would descend ” 

“ C’est convenu ” ’interrupted Madame Jeanne; “o7i, c’estconvenu. 
Your wife is the peril of her sex, she is a second Madame Saint 
Elizabeth, all the world knows that; when we see her at dinner 
we expect an angel to fill her glass with wine of Paradise; oh, 
yes, you cannot suppose I mean the slightest indiscretion in her. 
Vera is incapable of an indiscretion — so inc apable that in a less 


MOTHS. 


beautiful woman such extreme goodness would make her utterly 
uninteresting; but, still, for that very reason she is just the sort 
of person to cling to an idea, to preserve a sentiment like a relic 
in a silver box; and I have always heard, if you have not, that 
Correze is her idea, is her relic.” 

Zouroff listened gloomily; he did not as yet believe her, yet a 
dark sense of jealousy began to burn in him as slow-matches 
burn — a little spark slowly creeping that in time will fire a city. 
It was scarcely jealousy so much as it was offense, and irritated 
credulity, and masterful possession stung by idea of invasion. 

, But as yet he believed nothing; he smiled a little moodily. 

“ Your imagination runs away with you,” he said, curtly. 

Vere was sixteen years oil when I married her; English girls, 
via chere, do not have affairs at that age, even if at the same hour 
in France Cupid creeps behind the lexicons and missals.” 

Jeanne de Sonnaz was angry in her turn. When she had been 
sixteen, at her convent she had been very near causing a terrible 
scandal with a young lieutenant of Chasseurs, whom her power- 
ful family succeeded in having discreetly ordered to Africa; she 
had not thought that Sergius Zouroff knew aught of that sillv old 
story. 


“I did not speak of Cupid, or of anything so demoralizing and 
demode ,” she said, carelessly. “ I know there was some story, I 
remember it very well, something romantic and graceful, of 
Correze and your wife, when she was a girl — a very young girl; 
I think he saved her life, I am not sure; but I know that she 
thinks him a guardian angel. Pray, did you know that it was 
his interposition that sent Noisette back to Paris that day of our 
fancy-fair?” . . , 

Zouroff swore a savage oath. “ What accursed interference! 
what insolent audacity! Are you sure?” 

“Correze i$ as insolent as if he were a prince of the blood. 
More so; for they must please to reign, but he reigns to please— 
himself,” said Madame Jeanne, with a little laugh. “ Did you 
never know that of Noisette ? Oh, how stupid men are ! I 
guessed it, and I found it out. Women always can, when they 
choose, find out anything. Correze is always taking the part or 
knight to your wife: he kills the dragons and phases the robbers, 
and is always there when she wants him; did he not save hex 
from the storm off Villafranca?” _ . 

Zouroff paced to and fro the room, to the peril of the brim* 
borions and bric-a-brac. There was a heavy frown on his brows; 
he remembered the storm off Villafranca only too well, since it 
t ad preceded the song of the “ Golden Cup.” 

“ I do not believe it,” he said, doggedly; and he did not. 

“ So much the better,” said his friend, dryly. 

“I always notice.” she added, after a little pause, “that very 
cynical and skepticakpeople (you are very skeptical and very 
cynical) never do believe in a simple truth that stares them in the 
face. I am not saying the least harm of your wife; where is the 
barm? She is of an exalted temperament; she takes life like a 
poem, like a tragedy; she is a religious woman, who really be- 
lieves in sins, just as our peasantry in ‘ la Bretagne bretonnante 


ilO 


MOTHS. 


believe in spirits and saints; she will never do any harm what- 
ever. But for that very reason she shuts her relic up in her sil- 
ver box and worships it at home. Correze is always worshiped, 
though not always so spiritually. No one ever worships you, my 
dear; you are not of that order of men. Why do you look so 
angry? You should be thankful. It is very nice that your wife 
3hould admire a relic; she might, you know, be dragging your 
name across Europe at the coat-tails of a dozen young dragoons, 
and though you could shoot them, no doubt, that is always very 
ridiculous. It is so impossible for husbands at any time not to look 
ridiculous. You must have looked very so when Correze was 
singing that song. Oh, I shall regret to the last day of my life 
that I was not there!” 

Madame Jeanne leaned back and laughed aloud, with her hands 
behind her head and her eyes shut. 

Zouroff continued to pace to and fro the little, pretty, crowded 
chamber. 

“ You will break some of my idols,” she said, when she had 
done laughing. “I hope I have not broken one of your idols. 
How could one ever suppose you cared for your wife ?” 

“ It is not that,” said Zouroff, roughly : he was shaken, disturb- 
ed, enraged ; he did not know what to think, and the vanity and 
arrogance that served him in the stead of pride were up in arms. 

“Of course, yes; it is that,” said Madame Jeanne, coolly. “I 
always wondered you were so indifferent to her , she is so hand- 
some. And I always thought that if she ever loved any one else 
you would be madly in love with her once more, or rather much 
more than you were at first.” 

Zouroff made a gesture so savage as he motioned her to silence 
that even her tongue ceased for a moment its chatter. 

“One must not say too much/' she thought, “ or he will go and 
do something premature.” 

“What does it matter?” she said, consolingly: “a woman 
who is so much left to herself as Vera is will be certain to find 
some compensation for all you deny her. You clumsy Baltic 
bear! you do not understand women. Believe me, it is very 
dangerous to marry a mere girl, a child, hurl all her illusions and 
all her modesties away in one month, and then leave her all alone 
with the reflections you have inspired and the desires you have 
awakened. I am no moralist, mon ami . as you know, but that I do 
say. It is true ten thousand times in ten years ; and ten thousand 
times the result is the same. Were the Princess Zouroff to have a 
lover, Correze or any other, you could not complain. It would sim- 
ply be the natural sequence of your own initiations. As it is, you 
must be thankful that she is Madame Saint Elizabeth. You are 
not more ridiculous than the world is; mothers screen their 
daughters from every hint and every glimpse of impropriety, and 
then they marry them and think no harm can come of it. Can 
a bishop’s blessing muzzle sense once eveillees , passions once let 
loose? Vere is faithful to you as yet. But, if she were not, 
could you blame her? Can you expect a woman of her years to 
live the life of a nun when you have treated her as if she were a 
fitte dejoie f Be reasonable. You cannot tear the skin off a 


MOTHS. 


311 

peach and then complain that it does not retain its bloom. Yet 
that is what you and all men do do. It is utterly absurd. Some 
one will do it with my Berthe and my Claire, and I shall hate 
the some one ; for I love my little girls. Yes, I do i While you 
know very well that she is ” 

“ You preach very eloquently!” said Zouroff, with his face 
flushed and his thick eyebrows drawn together. 

“I preach what I know,” said his friend,— “ what I have oh- 
served, as I say, a thousand times ten thousand times; men teach 
lubricity and expect chastity. It is really too ridiculous > But it 
' is what we call the holiness of marriage. Now, will you please 
to go away? Paul has a ‘ fusion ’ breakfast of all the parties, and 
I want to dress.” 

<( But ” 

“Go away!” said Madame Jeanne, imperiously, with a little 
stamp of her slipper, 

Zouroff, who even to his own autocratic master was seldom 
obedient, took his leave, and went. She had made his blood hot 
with rage, his head dull with suspicion. He threw himself into 
his carriage and drove through the streets of Paris in moody re- 
flection. Uttered by a virtuous woman, the words he had heard 
would have made no more impression than any court sermon 
that he had to sit throughout and hear in an imperial chapel; 
but spoken by Jeanne de Sonnaz they smote him hardly. 

A better emotion than was usual with her had moved her in 
speaking them, a sense of justice toward the absent woman 
whom she had yet all the will in the world to destroy; and the 
bitterness of them must have been an unwilling witness from 
a femme galante to which he could not attach either favoritism 
or prejudice, and so weighed on him and smote him heavily. A 
rebuke even from Saint John of the Golden Mouth would have 
left him callous and scoffing; but a condemnation from the lips 
of one of the companions of his sins and follies one of the 
worldliest of this world — made him wince under its justice, and 
he knew that his sins against his wife were heavier and grosser 
than even Jeanne de Sonnaz knew or guessed. 

The sullen remorse that had brooded in him ever since the day 
on the terrace at Villafranca deepened and darkened over him. 
There was cruel and coarse blood in his veins, the blood of a 
race that through long centuries had passed their lives in pas- 
Bion, in tyranny, and in deeds of violence, denying no impulse, 
fearing no future. But there was manliness in him also, though 
weakened, depraved, and obscured; and this manliness made 
him feel a coward beside Yere. 

A curious jealousy took possession of him, which was half 
hatred and half remorse. He felt like one of those princes who 
own a classic and world-renowned statue, and shut it in a cab- 
inet, and never care to look at it, yet who being menaced with 
its loss suddenly rise to fury and feel beggared; not because the 
classic marble was any joy or marvel to themselves, but because 
the world had envied it to them vainly and it had made their 
treasure house the desired of others. He suddenly realized tnat 
the loss of his wife would, like that of the statue, make him poor 


MOTHS. 


819 


in the eyes of Europe, arid leave his palaces without their chief 
ornament. He did not, as yet, believe himself menaced. like 
most men of vicious lives, he was never deceived as to a wom- 
an’s innocence. He knew his wife to be as innocent as the 
little dead children she had borne in her bosom. But how long 
weuld she be so ? 

And if she ceased to be so, truth, by those often untrue lips of 
Jeanne de Sonnaz, had told him that the fault would lie at his\ 
own door, that he would reap as he had sown. 

As he drove through the streets amidst the noise of Paris, he 
saw nothing of the glitter and the movement round him; he 
saw Yere in her white, childish loveliness, as he had seen her on 
herwedding-night. 

That evening, when he returned to make his toilet for a 
great dinner at the Russian Embassy, he was gloomy, perplexed, 
irresolute. It was toward the close of the season; the evening 
was hot; the smell of the lilacs in the garden filled all the air; 
over where ruined St. Cloud lay there was a mist that seemed 
full of rain and thunder. 

For the first time for months, he bade the women ask his wife 
if she could receive him in her room, and he entered it. Vere 
was standing beneath the picture of Gerome; she was already 
dressed. She wore white velvet, a stuff which she preferred, 
and whose subtle shades of white it would have been the delight 
and the despair of Titian and Paul Veronese to reproduce on 
canvas or on panel. She wore the Great Russian Order of St. 
Catherine. About her throat she had coils of pearls, and under 
these hung the medallion of the moth and the star. 

Zouroff approached her with a roughness that concealed an 
unusual nervousness. His eyes fell on the necklace, and his 
anger, that was half against himself and half against her, seized 
on the jewel as a scapegoat. 

« Who gave you that?” he said, abruptly. 

She answered: _ _ , T 

“ I think I ought not to say. When you asked me long ago, I 
did not know.” , _ „ 

“ Your singer sent it you. Take it off. 

She hesitated a moment, then unclasped it. She believed m 
the old forgotten duty of obedience still. 

“Give it to me.” 


She gave it him. ... , 

Zouroff threw it on the ground, and set his heel on it, and 
stamped the delicate workmanship and the exquisite jewels out 
of all shape and into glittering dust. 

Vere did not move a muscle. Only her fane grew cold like a 
stone mask with unutterable scorn. 

“ A Princess Zouroff does not need to go to the properties of a 
theater for her jewels,” he said, in a thick, lioarse £ voice. “ As I 
have treated that jewel, so I will treat the man if ever you let 
him enter your presence again. You hear ?” 

All color had gone from her lips, but her face remained cold 


and calm. 


MOTHS . 


313 


‘‘Well?” said her husband, roughly, already in a measure 
ashamed of his violence, as the diamond star covered the carpet 
beneath his feet with sparkling atoms. 

“ What do you want me to say ? I am your wife, and you can 
offend me in any way, and I cannot resent it. There is no use in 
saying what I think of that.” 

He was silent, and in a measure subdued. He knew very well 
that his violence had been cowardly and unworthy, that he had 
disgraced his name and place, that he had been a coward and no 
gentleman. His new-born sense of fear and of veneration of 
her struggled with his incensed vanity and his irritated suspi- 
cions. 

“Vera,” he muttered, only half aloud, “before God, if you 
would let me, I could love you now!” 

She shuddered. 

“ Spare me that, at least!” 

He understood, and was silent. He glanced at her longingly, 
sullenly, furtively. The shattered jewel lay at his feet. 

“What is that singer to you?” he said, abruptly. 

“A man who honors me. You do not.” 

“Were he only of my rank I would insult him, and shoot him 
dead.” 

Vere was silent. 

“What do you say?” he muttered, impatient of her silence. 

“ He is of your rank, and he can defend himself. His hand is 
clean, and so also is his conscience.” 

“ Will you swear he is no lover of yours?” 

Her eyes flashed, but she took the book of prayer lying on her 
table, kissed it, and said — 

“I swear that certainly.’ 

Then she laid the book down, and, with an accent he had never 
heard from her, she turned suddenly on him, in a passion of in- 
dignation that transformed her coldness into fire. 

“ How dare you? how dare you?” she said, with a vibration in 
her voice that he had never heard there. “Now that you have 
done me the last insult that a man can pass upon his wife, be 
satisfied, and go.” 

Then she put her hand out and pointed to the door. 

He lingered, dazed and fascinated by that new power in her 
glance, that new meaning in her voice. 

“Women change like that when they love,” he said to her 
aloud. “Are you not of the new school, then? You know very 
well you have no fidelity from me. Why should you be faithful 
to me? They say you need not be.” 

She still seemed to him transfigured and risen above him. Her 
fair face had the glow of holy scorn, of just wrath, still on it. 

“Are your sins the measures of my duty?” she said, with un- 
utterable contempt. “ Do you think if it were only for you, for 
you, that I were decent in my life and true to my obligation I 
should not years ago have failed and been the vilest thing that 
lives? You do not understand. Have you never heard of self- 
respect, of honor, and of God?” 

'Hie words touched him, and the look upon her face awed him 


314 


MOTHS. 


for lan instant into belief in her and belief in 'heaven; but 
against his instinct and against his faith the long habit of a 
brutal cynicism and a mocking doubt prevailed, and the devil 
an him, that had so long lived with the vile and the foolish of 
his world, drove him to answer her a bitter sneer. 

“Your words are grand,” be said to her, “and I believe you 
mean them. Yes, you do not lie. But those fine things, my 
princess, may last so long as a woman is untempted, but so 
long only. You are all Eve’s daughters.” 

Then he bowed and left her. He hated himself for ithe thing 
hie had said, but he could not have stayed the devil in him, that 
uttered At. If his wife betrayed him that night ,*he knew that he 
would have no title to condemn her; yet he thought, as he went 
from her presence, if she did— df she did — he would slit the throat 
of her singing-bird, or of any other man, if any other it were. 

Vere stood erect, a somber disgust and revolt in her eyes. 
Her husband had said to her, “Thou fool! all sin alike; do thou 
likewise.” 

In a few minutes she stooped and raised the fragments of the 
jewels and the t'wdsted and broken goldsmith’s work. It was 
all Shattered except the sapphire moth. 

She .Shut the moth and all the shining, brilliant dust in a 
secret drawer of her jewel-case, then rang for her women. In 
another twenty minutes she entered her carriage, and drove in 
silence, with her husband beside her, to the Rue de Grenelle. 

“Be Prince et la Princesse Zaur off,” shouted the lackeys, 
standing in a gorgeous line down the staircase of the embassy. 

* — 

CHAPTER XXV. 

It was an April night when the necklace of the moth andl the 
star perished under the heel of Zouroff; there were two months 
more through which the life in Paris lasted, for Zouroff adored 
the boulevards, even in summer months; the asphalte had a 
power to charm him that even the grass of his forest drives 
never rivaled, and t'he warm nights of spring and early summer 
found him driving down the Champs Eilysees to and from his 
various haunts, his carriage-lamps adding two stars (the more 
to its long river of light. 

Coming home in the full daylight from his pleasures, he 
would at times meet 'his wife going out in the clear hours of the 
early forenoon. He asked her once, roughly, where ©he was 
going, and she told him,, naming the poorest quarter on the 
other side of the Seine. 

“Wihjy do you go to such a place?” he a'sked her, as she stood 
on the staircase. 

“There are poor there, and great misery,” she answered him, 
reluctantly; she did not care to speak of these things at any time. 

“And what good will you do? You will be cheated and 
robbed; and, even if you are not, you should know that political 
science has found that private charity is 'the hotbed of all idle- 
ness.” 

“When: political science has advanced enough ito prevent pov- 


MOTHS. 


315 

erty, it may have the right to prevent charity too," she answered 
hian, with a contempt that showed thought on the theme was not 
new to her. “ Perhaps charity — I dislike the word — may do no 
good; but friendship from the rich to the poor must do good; it 
must lessen class hatreds.” 

“ Are you a socialist ?” said Zouroff, with a little laugh, and 
drew back and let her pass onward. They were the first words 
he had spoken to her alone since the night he had destroyed the 
necklace, and even now they were not unheard; for there were 
half a score of servants on the stairs and in the vestibule below. 
Yere went out to her little brougham in the fresh air of the 
warm lilac-scented morning as the clock struck ten. 

Her husband took his way to his own set of rooms, rich with 
Oriental stuffs and weapons, and heavy with the fumes of to- 
bacco. He thought of what his sister had said of Saint Elizabeth 
and the roses of Paradise; he thought, too, of what Jeanne de 
Sonnaz had said. His wife was greatly changed. 

She seemed to him to have aged ten years all suddenly — not in 
the fair beauty of her face, but in her regard, in her tone, in her 
look. Was she like the young royal saint of Hungary, or was she 
like all women, as he knew them? He had the careless, half-con- 
ecious, but profound belief in depravity that is the note of the 
century: he thought all women coqziines. That his wife was dif- 
ferent from the rest he had believed; but that she was incapable 
of deceiving him he was in no way sure. Sooner or later they 
all went the same road, so lie thought. He began to doubt that 
she told him the truth as to these errands of her morning hours; 
his sister believed in them indeed, but what should his sister 
know, who was never out of her bed till noon was past? 

Yere had no physical fear, and at times she penetrated into the 
darkest and roughest quarters of Paris — the quarters that belch 
out those hidden multitudes that make revolution anarchy and 
shatter in dust and blood the visions of patriots. But she was 
safe there, though once she heard one man say to another 
“ Diantre! what a sight it would be, that lovely head on a scaf- 
fold.” She turned and looked at him with a smile: “ I think I 
should know how to die, my friend; are you quite sure that you 
would?” 

As this worst form of suspicion, that of the tyrants, grew upon 
him, he did what he knew was low and vile and beneath him; 
he had her watched in these daily hours of absence. He excused 
his vigilance to those who had the task by the expression of his 
fears for her safety from the rude and ferocious classes among 
whom she went. They brought him the weekly report of all she 
did, minute by minute, in all its trifling details; the courage and 
the self-sacrifice oL that thankless labor, the self-devotion and 
patience of that cnarity, were before him in a chronicle she 
would never have written herself. The superstition that under- 
lies the worldly wisdom of the aristocratic Russian, as it per- 
meates the kindly stupidity of the Russian peasant, began to stir 
in him and trouble him. He began to think she was a holy creat- 
ure. Though he had no faith hs V/l that vague religious fear 


MOTHS. 


316 

which often survives the death of all religious beliefs, with those 
who have been educated in strict rituals, as he had been. 

When June came they went to Felicite. It was the same thing 
every year. The world went with them. To her it seemed 
always as if they were perpetually on the stage before an audi- 
ence; the audience varied, but the play was always the same. 

She would have given ten years of her life for a few weeks' 
rest, silence, solitude, with “plain living and high thinking,” and 
time to watch the clouds, the showers, the woodlands, the ways 
of birds and beasts, the loves of the bees and the flowers. But 
she never had one day even to herself. There was always on her 
ear the murmur of society — always, like the shadow on the sun- 
dial, some duty that was called pleasure, obscuring each hour as 
it came. 

It was a bright Norman summer, the weather clear and buoy- 
ant, the country a sea of apple-blossoms. Once or twice she 
got away by herself, and went to the little cluster of cabins on 
the head of the cliffs beyond Villerville. The old woman was 
there— always knitting, always with a white cap and a blue linen 
gown, against the wall of furze. 

“ The lark is dead,” she said, with a shake of the head. “ It 
was no fault of mine, my princess; a boy with a stone one day — 
ah! ah! — how shall I tell the gentleman when he comes? He has 
not been yet this summer; he was here in midwinter — oh, quite 
midwinter — and he said he was going away into the North some- 
where. Jesu-Maria! the heaps of cent sous pieces he gave me 
to take care of that lark!” 

The shrewd old woman under the white roof of her cap watch- 
ed the face of her “ princess.” “I want to know if she cares 
too,” she thought. “ But that beautiful angel could not fail to 
be loved.” 

Vere went away slowly through the high grove, even under the 
shade of the apple-blossoms. How long ago — it seemed long as a 
century — since she had been the child listening, with her heart in 
her eyes, to the song of the lark that was dead! 

Her husband said to her sharply that day after her return, 
“ Where were you this morning? You were hours away.” 

“ I drove to Villerville,” she answered him. 

I “There is a shrine near there, I think?” added Madame 
Jeanne, with apparent simplicity. 

The somber thoughts of Zouroff taught her that. 

" I know of no remarkable shrine,” replied Vere, who did not 
imagine any double meaning in the words. “There is none 
nearer than Val de Grace.” 

. Her husband was silent. The duchess rose, and hummed a 
little song then being sung by Jane Hading; Vous voulez vous 
moquer de moi. 

This year Madame Jeanne stayed at Felicite. Why not? She 
had her little girls Berthe and Claire with her, and her husband 
came now and then, and would come for a longer time when the 
bosquets of pheasants would begin to fall in the drives of the 

park. 


MOTHS. 


31 f 

" Pour quoi pas?” she had said, when Zouroff had begged her 
to stay in his house, instead of taking a villa at Trouviile. 

“ You would not last year,” he said, with a man’s stupidity. 

“ Last year was last year,” said the duchess, dryly; and she 
came over, and had all the south wing of the chateau for herself 
and her Berthe and Claire and their governesses. She was really 
fond of her children. 

The papers of that day spoke of Correze. He was in Stock* 
holm. 

“ That is far enough : she cannot have met him,” thought the 
duchess. “ Villerville must be a pilgrimage of remembrance. 
There are women who can live on memories. It must be like 
eating nothing but ices and wafers. A bon bouillon and a little 
burgundy is better.” 

Vere had given her word to her husband, and her oath : she 
never supposed that he would doubt either. If Correze had come 
before her in that time, she would have said to him, with loyal 
firmness, “ I must not see you : my husband has forbidden me.” 
She was steadfast rather than impassioned ; honor was the first 
law of life to her ; that love should stoop to tread in secret ways 
and hide in secret places seemed to her as shameful, nay, gro- 
tesque, as for a sovereign to hide in a cellar or flee in disguise. 
The intrigues she saw perpetually in which her world spent its 
time, as the spiders theirs in weaving webs, had no savor, no 
sweetness, for her. Its roots were set in treachery or cowardice 
— in either, or in both. All the tenderness that was in her nature 
Correze had touched ; all her gratitude and all her imagination 
were awakened by him ; she knew that the sorrow of a love that 
might have been sweet and happy in their lives was with them 
both in sad and hopeless resignation. Yet if he had come before 
her now she would have said to him, “ I cannot see you : it 
would be disloyal.” 

For the old lovely quality of loyalty, which day by day is more 
and more falling out from the creeds of men and women, was 
very strong in her; and failure in it seemed to her like “ shame, 
last of all evils. ” 

To Jeanne de Sonnaz this was very droll — so droll that it was 
impossible for her to believe in it. She believed in realism, in 
the moldy cheese and the pewter can; she did not believe in Ruy 
Bias. She watched Yere narrowly, but she failed to understand 
her. 

“How the affair drags!” she thought, later, with some impa- 
tience. “ Can they really be the lovers of romance, who sepa- 
rate themselves by a thousand leagues and only love the more 
the more they are divided? It is droll.” 

So she kept the snake of suspicion alive and warm in his bot>om. 

“You were wrong,” said Zouroff with some triumph to her; 
“ you were wrong. The man is in Norway and Sweden.” 

“I may be,” said the duchess, meditatively, “But people 
come back from Norway and Sweden, and I never said, you will 
remember, that he was more to your wife than her knight, her 
ideal, her souvenir. I never meant more than that. Wait until 
he shall return; then you will see.” 


318 


M01HS. 


Then he told her how he had destroyed the necklace. For 
years he had been in the habit of telling her such things; and he 
now sacrificed his wife to that habit of confidence in another 
woman. 

“ You see you were wrong,” he added: “ had she borne any sen- 
timent towards him would she have seen his jewels destroyed ? 
She is not spiritless.” 

“No, she is not spiritless.” said Madame Jeanne, thoughtfully. 
“ No, certainly she is not that. But — in the old houses of the 
Faubourg, Sergius, I met a phantom of the past that we know 
nothing about; a phantom that is made a deity and rules their 
lives like their love of Henri Cinq; a mere ghost, but still potent 
to omnipotence, and we know nothing about it: they call it Prin- 
ciple. I suppose your wife may keep that old demode ghost by 
her too, and may be ruled by it. I have heard of such things. 
Oh. we have no principle; we have only convenience and impulse, 
and act either one or the other. But I assure you such a thing 
exists.” 

“Scarcely in a woman,” said Zouroff, with a contemptuous 
laugh. 

“ Sooner in a woman than in a man, for that matter. But of 
course it will not last forever. Your wife is human, and she 
will not pardon you that ruined locket.” 

“ She said nothing, or very little.” 

“ Said!” echoed Madame de Sonnaz, with scorn; ‘ ‘ you are used 
to us, and to your creatures. Do you think a woman of her 
temperament would scream as we, or swear as they do, would 
go into hysterics, or would tear your beard?” 

“ You seem to admire my wife,” he said, with irritation. 

Jeanne de Sonnaz smiled, “You know I always did. I ad- 
mire her as one admires Racine, as one admires the women of 
Port Royal, the paintings o f Flandrin, the frescoes of Michael 
Angelo. It is quite unattainable, quite unintelligible to me, but 
I admire dumbly and without comprehension. Only I told you 
that you never should have married a saint; and you never 
should. I am sorry you destroyed her medallion. It was brutal 
of you, and bourgeois. 

“ And she will remember it,” she added, after a pause, as she 
gathered up her silks, with which she was working an altar- 
; screen for her parish church at Ruilhieres, “ be very sure of that. 
Vera is not a woman who forgets. I should box your ears, shake 
you, and laugh at it all next day; but she would be passive and 
yet never forget, nor forgive. Chut. There she is!” 

Vere at that moment entered the room in which Madame 
Jeanne was working, her husband moved with a guilty con- 
sciousness away ; but she had heard nothing. 

“Princess, tell me,” said Madame de Sonnaz, “do you for- 
give easily? I think not.” 

“ Forgive?” said Vere, absently. “ Is there any question of it! 
It is for those who offend to ask me that.” 

<jt Do you hear, Sergius?” said his friend, with a little laugh. 
44 1 should like to hear your mea culpa.” 

J?Oi' the first time, an angry doubt came into the mind of Vere*, 


'MOTHS' 


SIS 


the doubt that her husband spoke of her with Jeanne de Sonnaz. 
She *ooked at them both quickly and haughtily, then said, very 
clearly: 

“If Monsieur Zouroff know anything that he desires me to 
pardon, he can speak for himself, without an ambassadress, and 
without a listener. I came to ask you to allow Berthe and Claire 
to come out with me on the sea.” 

“ How good you are to those children! but you will inoculate 
them with your own sea-frenzy,” answered the duchess, with a 
little laugh. “ Of course they may go.” 

Zouroff had already gone from the room, angry with his fric ' , 
more angry with his wife. Madame Jeanne rose a jittle impetu- 
ously, dragging to the ground the artistic embroideries of the 
shield she was working. 

“ Vera,” she said, with candor in her voice and honesty in her 
regard, “ do not be angry. I am so old a friend of Sergius — he 
has told me how he tore off your locket and destroyed it. I am 
so sorry, so very sorry; so* is he. But, alas! men are always 
the same; they are all brutes, we know, and, Yera, he is very 
jealous of your singer.” 

Vere’s face grew very stern. 

“ Has he commanded you to speak to me on his behalf?” 

“ No, my dear, not that, he would scarcely do that in plain 
words. But I am an old friend, and I am sorry. Of course it is 
too absurd, but he is very jealous. Be careful; men of his race 
have done mad and cruel things in their time. Do not provoke 
him. Do not see Correze.” 

“ You mean well, madame,” said Yere, in tones of ice. “ But 
you err in taste and wisdom, and I think your zeal outstrips your 
orders. I scarcely think even my husband can have charged you 
with his threats to me.” 

“Threats? who spoke of threats? A warning ” 

“ A warning, then, but none the less an insult. You are in 
my house, so I can say nothing. Were I in yours, I would leave 
it. Your children are waiting in impatience; excuse me.” 

Madame Jeanne looked after her as she went though the glass 
doors on to the sea-terrace, where the pretty little figures of Berthe 
and Claire were dancing to and fro in the sunlight. Madame 
Jeanne drew her tapestry -frame toward her, and proceded to fill 
in the lilies of Saint Cunegonde. She smiled as she bent her head 
over the frame. 

“ If I have ever known my sex,” she thought — “if I have ever 
known my sex, a word will go over the North Sea, and Correze 
will come from his Norwegian summer to a Norman one, and 
then— and then— there will be droll things to see. It is like 
watching the curtain rise in the Ambigu — there is sure to be 
melodrama.” 

Melodrama amused her — amused her more than comedy. She 
had no belief in quiet passion or quiet grief herself, any more 
than she had in quiet principles. 

Vere went out to sea with the little children, and in the mellow 
Sunshine and the sweet orchard-scented air her face was dark 


320 * MOTHS. 

with anger and with disgust, and her heart heaved in a bittei rag# 
and rebellion. 

Her husband spoke of her to another woman, discussed ner 
acts with another man’s wife! “Oh, the coward, the coward!’’ 
she said very low between her set teeth; it was the blackest 
word that her language held. That he should have broken her 
medallion and insulted her with doubt was insult enough for a 
lifetime. But that he should relate the affront, and breathe the 
suspicion to another woman, seemed to her the very last baseness 
of life. 

“If he were here!” she murmured, with a sudden new-born 
consciousness in her, as her eyes filled with scalding tears and 
her heart heaved with indignation. For the first time, an in- 
definite yearning rose in her to place her hand in the hand of 
Correze, and say “Avenge me!” Yet had he even stood before 
her then she would not have said it; she would have bidden him 
go and leave her. 

For what Madame Jeanne called a phantom was always beside 
her in her path — the phantom of old-world honor, the wraith of 
dead heroical days. 

She leaned against the rail and watched the sea run by the ves- 
sel’s side, and felt the quiet, slow tears of a great anguish fill her 
eyes and wet her cheeks. 

“ Do not cry — you are too pretty to cry, ’’ said little Claire, who 
was a soft and tender child; and Berthe, w r ho was older, and clev- 
erer, and harder, said: “You should not cry, it spoils the eyes.” 
Then she added, reflectively: “ Maman ne pleure jamais .” 

The little yacht they were in ran with the breeze through the 
sweet fresh air. It was a little nautical toy, perfect in its way, 
that had been given to Yere by her husband when the estate of 
Felicite was settled upon her; the children had wanted to go to 
the Vaches Noires and search for mussels, and the little ship skirt- 
ed the coast as lightly as a sea-gull, the merry little girls scud- 
ding about its deck like kittens and climbing its cordage like 
squirrels, while their mother — their mother who never cried — 
remained in the garden of Felicite, with a cigar in her teeth, her 
person stretched full length in a low-hung silk hammock, a cir- 
cle of gentlemen around her, and amidst them her host, so stun- 
ned by the dexterity of her coquetries, and so diverted by the 
maliciousness of her pleasantries, that the old passion, which a 
dozen years before she had awakened in him, perhaps the worst, 
as it was in a sense the strongest and most durable, he had ever 
known, revived in him sufficiently for jealousy, and held him by 
her side. 

It was low water when they reached that part of the Vaches 
Noires which lies underneath what is called the desert. The 
strange-shaped rocks towered above, beyond the sea was blue and 
smooth, the sand was wet, the children’s cquille - fishing promised 
well. A little boat took them off the yacht to the uncovered 
beach, and Berthe and Claire, with naked little legs, and their 
forks shaped like the real fisher folk’s, and their bright hair fly- 
ing, forgot that they were little aristocrats and Parisiennes, and 
became noisy, joyous, romping, riotous children, happy in their 


MOTHS. 


821 


sport and the fine weather At that part of the rough shore there 
was no one near, except some peasants digging for their livelihood, 
as the little girls were digging for play, at the silvery hermits’ 
holes in the sand. There were fetes at Houlgate that kept the 
summer crowd that day from the distant rocks. Berthe and 
Claire, agile as^thev were, were no'match for the agility of the lords 
of the soil, and the pastime absorbed and distracted them. Yere, 
seeing them so happy, left them in the care of her old skipper, 
who was teaching them the mysteries of the sport, and sat down 
under the somber amphitheater of the rocks. 

She was fond of the children, but that day their shouts and 
their smiles alike jarred on her; she had learned for the first time 
that it was with their mother that her husband discussed her 
acts and thoughts. She sat quite alone in a sheltered spot, 
where the slate of the lower formation had been hollowed by the 
winter waves at high tides into a sort of niche; she thought of 
the day when, older in years than these little children, but 
younger in heart than even they were now, she had come on 
these shores in her old brown holland skirts. It was just such a 
day as that day had been — clear, cloudless, with a sunlit sea, and 
an atmosphere so free from mist that the whole line of the far- 
reaching coast, now become so familiar to her sight, was visible 
in all its details, from the mouth of Seine to the mouth of Orne. 

Her heart was very weary. 

The distant laughter of the little children, borne to her ear by 
the wind, jarred on her. Where was the use of honor and good 
faith? They smelt sweet, like a wholesome herb, in her own 
hand, but in all her world none set any store on them. She was 
free to throw them aside if she chose. She would be more 
popular, find more sympathy, nay, to her husband himself would 
seem more human and more truthful, if she did so. The sense 
of life’s carelessness, impotency for good, and frightful potency 
for evil, weighed on her like a stone. Her husband had said to 
her that women were only loyal till they were tempted, was it 
so? Was honor so poor a thing? she thought. In dark old Bul- 
mer the now dead woman had taught her to think honor a sword 
like Britomart s, that in a maiden’s hand might be as potent and 
as strong as in a knight’s. Vv r hat was the poor, frail, empty thing 
that bent at a touch and broke? She thought what they called 
honor must surely be no finer or better thing than a mere dread 
of censure, a mere subserviency to opinion, a thing without sub- 
stance or soul, a mere time-service and cowardice. 

A fisherman came by her with his load of mussels and little 
eels, going on to Bougeval. He pointed up above her head, and 
said, in his Froissart-like accent — 

“There will be a broken neck up yonder, unless Our Lady in- 
terferes.” 

Vere, alarmed for the children, who were out of sight, looked 
upward: she saw a man coming down the precipitous cliffs from 
the country above. 

Her heart stood still; her blood ran cold: she recognized Cor- 
reze. 

The fisher stood staring upward; the descent was one which 


m 


MOTHS. 


the people themselves would never have attempted; where the 
face of the dark stone was a sheer declivity, broken into sharp 
peaks and rough bastions, on which there seemed scarce a ledge 
for a sea-bird to perch on. Correze was descending with the 
sure foot that in his boyhood had let him chase the ibex and 
the boudequin of the Alps of Dauphine and Savoy, and had let 
him in later years hunt the steinbock of Styria and Carinthia 
in its highest haunts. Yere, risen to her feet, stood like the 
fisherman gazing upward. She was like stone herself; she 
neither moved nor cried out; she scarcely breathed. She looked 
upward, and ; r. 'chose few moments all the horrors of death passed 
over her. 

Was it an instant, or an hour? She never knew. One moment 
he was in the air, hanging as the birds hang to the face of the 
cliff, beneath him only the jagged points and buts of a thousand 

{ rinnacles of rock; the next he stood before her, having dropped 
ightly and easily on the sands, while the peasant, gasping, mut> 
tered his paternosters in incoherent awe. Correze was very pale, 
and his lips trembled a little; but it was not the perilous descent 
of the rocks that had shaken him, it was the look which he saw 
on her face. If he had dared, nay, had she been any other 
woman, he would have said, “ You cannot deny it now; you love 
me.” 

Their eyes met as they stood together on the same coast where 
they had first seen each other, when he was gay and without 
sorrow as she was a child. They knew .then that they loved 
each other, as they had not known it when he had sung in the 
Paris salon — 

“ Si vous saviez que je vous aime, 

Surtout si yous saviez comment — ” 

For between them there then had been doubt, hesitation, offense, 
uncertainty; but now the great truth was bare to them both, and 
neither dreamed of denying it. 

Yet he only said, as he uncovered his head, “Forgive me, 
princess; I fear I startled you.” 

“ You startled me/' she answered, mechanically. “Why run 
such a frightful danger?” 

“ It is none to me. The rocks are safer than the ice walls. I 
was above, and I saw you ; there was no other way.” 

The fisher had shouldered his creel and was trudging home- 
ward. He paused abruptly. He stood before her, still barehead- 
ed. He was very pale. 

Without being conscious what she did, she had seated herself 
again on the ledge of slate, the sea and the shore blended dizzily 
before her eyes. 

Correze watched her anxiously, pitifully. His courage failed 
him. He was afraid of this woman, whom he loved — he who 
had been always in love victorious. 

“ Have I displeased you?” he murmured, humbly. “1 have 
come straight from Norway. I thought I might take one hour 
on this coast before going to Paris. I heard that you were here. 
31 have been an exile many months ” 


MOTHS. 


323 


She stopped him with a gesture. 

“ I will not affect to misunderstand ; there is no good in affec- 
tation, but do not speak so to me. I cannot hear it. I thank 
you for your courage at Villafranca. I am not ungrateful, but 
we must not see each other, unless it be in the world.” 

“You did not say that at Villafranca.” 

“My husband had not then said it to me.” 

Correze moved and faltered a little, as if he had been struck a. 
blow. 

“ You obey Prince Zouroff!” he exclaimed, with disdain, and 
petulance, and passion. 

“ I obey the word I gave Prince Zouroff.” 

Silence fell between them. 

Vere was very pale; she was still seated; there was a sort of 
faintness on her; she had no time for thought or resolution; she 
only clung by instinct to one of the creeds of her childhood, the 
creed that a promise given was sacred. 

Correze stood beside her, checked, mortified, chafed, and hum- 
bled. He, the most eloquent and the most ardent lover of his 
time, was mute and wounded, and could find no word at the in- 
stant that could speak for him. He was struck dumb, and all 
the vivid imagining, the fervent persuasiveness, the poetical 
fluency that nature had given to him and art had perfected fled 
away from him as though they had never been his servants to 
command, and left him mute and helpless. 

Vere looked away from him at the blue shining sea. 

“If you think of me,” she said, slowfy, “ if you think of me 
as you thought when you sang the Coupe d’Or, you will go 
now.” 

“ With no other word?” 

“ My life is hard enough,” she murmured. “ Do not make it 
harder.” 

There was an unconscious appeal in the words that, from a 
woman so proud and so silent, touched him to the quick. All 
his passions longed to disobey her, but his tenderness, his 
chivalry, his veneration, obeyed. 

“I told my husband not long ago that you honored me,” she 
added, in a low voice. “Do not let me think that I deceived 
myself and him.” 

Correze bent his head. 

“ I will never deceive you,” he said, simply, “ and at any cost 
I will obey you.” 

He looked at her once; her eyes were still gazing away from 
him at the sea. He lingered an instant, then he laid on her knee 
some forget-me-nots he had gathered in the brooks above, and 
left her. Across the wet sands and the disordered detritus of the 
beach his light swift step bore him quickly to the edge of the 
murmuring sea. There was a boat there, an old brown rowing ' 
boat, with its owner mending nets on its bench. 

In a few moments the old boat was pushed in the water, the 
fisherman willingly berit to his oars — Correze also was rowing — 
with the helm set for Honfleur. When he was fax away on the 
water, he looked back, but then onlv: Vere sat motionless. 


MOTHS. 


&4 

He had been beside her, he whom an hour earlier she had 
longed for as an avenger, and she had driven him away. 

She bad been true to the false; to the unfaithful, faithful. 

The man whose genius had been the one solace and pleasure 
of her life, whose beauty and whose sympathy and whose 
chivalry were as a sorcery to her, who would have put his whole 
fate in her hands as he had put the myosotis, had been there 
beside her to do with as she chose, and she had sent him from 
her. 

Her husband had said, “ Women are true till they are tempted.” 
She had been tempted, and had been strong— strong enough not 
even to say to him, “ Avenge me.” 

The sun had sunk low, the late day grew gray, the dusky sea 
ran swiftly and smoothly, soon the terraces and towers of Felicite 
rose in sight through the twilight mists. The little children, 
tired and sleeping, lay curled quietly on their cushions at her feet; 
she felt weak and weary as if from some long combat, and her 
heart ached — ached for the pain she caused, the pain she bore. 
She stretched her hand over the rails and dropped the forget-me- 
nots in the fast-running sea. 

She would not keep a flower of his, now that she knew 

She saw the blue blossoms tossed for a moment on the water 
and then engulfed. “I do not want them,” she thought. “I 
shall never forget: it will be he who will forget.” 

For she thought so, with that humility of a lonely soul which 
is deemed so proud only because it is so sad. 

He would go into the world, be the world’s idol, and forget. 
But she would remember till she died. And even at this con- 
sciousness a sense of guilt came over her, a sense of shame burned 
in her. She loved this man, who was not her husband — she, a 
wife. To her conscience and her honor, both unworn and un- 
dulled, even so much as this seemed a treachery to her word and 
an uncleanliness. “Do I grow like the others?” she mused, with 
a sort of horror at herself — the others, the women of her world, 
who made intrigues their daily bread. “ Oh, my angel Raphael, 
you shall not fall, nor I!” she murmured, half aloud, as the sea 
swept on its foam the little blue blossoms, and her eyes grew 
blind, and her heart grew faint. 

Fall into the slough of abandoned passions, into the dishonesty 
of hidden loves, into the common, coarse cowardice of an impure 
secrecy? Ah, never, never I She felt cold, sick, weary, as she 
left the, little road under the shadow of the walls of Felicite, and 
ascended the stone steps that mounted from the sea to the gar- 
den. But she moved firmly and with her head erect. 

Honor is an old-world thing; but it smells sweet to those in 
whose hand it is strong. 

It was nearly nine; the shadows were dark; a low, pale-yellow 
line where the sun had gone down was all that was left of day. 
The little girls, sound asleep, were carried away from the boat 
by their women. The first gong was sounding that summoned the 
guests of the house to dinner. She was dressed quickly, and 
went down to the drawing-rooms; there was a shade like a bruise 


MOTHS . 322 

under her eyes, and her lips were pale; otherwise she looked as 
usual. 

Jeanne de Sonnaz, greeting her with effusion, kissed her and 
thanked her for the children’s happy day. 

Yere sat opposite her husband through the dinner, which was 
always a banquet. Her eyes were tired, but there was a steady 
light in them — something heroic and invincible, that made the 
grave beauty of her face like that of a young warrior’s. No one 
saw it. They only thought that she was tired, and so more silent 
than usual. 

The evening wore on its way; to her it seemed endless; there 
were many people staying in the house; it was such an evening 
as the first that she passed at Felicite, when she had watched 
society with wondering gaze, as a bright comedy. Jeanne de 
Sonnaz, with a dress of red and gold, and some of her grand 
rubies on, sparkled like a jewel, till her ugly face seemed radiant 
and handsome. She sang songs of Theo and of Judic; she played 
impromptu a scene of Celine Chaumont’s; she was brilliant and 
various as her manner was, and she sent a shower of mirth on 
the air that was to others as contagious as laughing gas. “ What 
a pity she tires herself so much by the sea or on it,” she said of 
Vere to Sergius Zouroff. “It makes her so silent and so morne 
in the evening.” 

lie muttered something like a suppressed oath, and went to 
his wife. 

“You look like a statue; you leave others to do all your duties 
for you; you sweep through the rooms like a ghost. Why can- 
not you rouse yourself, and laugh and dance?” 

Yere made him no answer. 

Laugh and dance in public, and in stealth betray him. To do 
that would have made him content, herself popular. 

The night wore itself away in time — she never well knew how; 
it closed somewhat earlier than usual, for the morrow was the 
first day of shooting, and Madame Jeanne had bidden them rise 
with the lark. Yere, instead of going to her room, went out into 
the gardens. The night was cool, fragrant, soundless, except 
for the murmur of the sea. 

“To laugh and wear a false or a foolish face — that is all he 
asks of me !” she thought, bitterly. If her husband could have 
seen her heart as it ached that night; if lie could have known 
that only out of loyalty to him she had cast the myosotis from 
her hand into the sea, would he not only have told her she was 
an imbecile, and was too fond of tragedy, and he was no Othello 
to be jealous of an humble handkerchief ? Y/ould he not have 
said, “Look around, and do like others?” 

It was between one and two o’clock ; the stars were all at their 
brightest, except where clouds hung over the sea to the north 
and obscured them ; the chateau was quiet behind her, — an irreg- 
ular yet picturesque pile, that grew somber and fantastic in the 
shadows, while in its casements a few lights only gleamed here 
and there through the ivy. 

Yera stood and looked at the waves of the Channel without 
seeing them. The world seemed empty and silent. Never again 


826 


MOTHS. 


-would she hear the voice that had first come to her ear on those 
shores — never again, except in some crowded salon or across 
some public theater. 

She shuddered, and went within. The silence and the solitude 
were too like her destiny not to hurt her more than even the 
“ vain laughter of fools.” It was the first time that the peace of 
nature and of night seemed a reproach to L: For, though 

innocent of any act unworthy or disloyal to hersell, .hie felt guilty ; 
she felt as if some poison had fallen in that golden cup which she 
strove to keep pure. To her a thought, a desire, a regret were 
forbidden things, since she was the wife of Sergius Zouroff. 

One glass door was open, and some lamps were burning, for 
the servants had seen that she remained on the terrace, and two 
or three of them, yawning and sleepy, stood in the antechambers 
waiting her entrance. 

She went up the staircase, past those bronze negroes, with 
their golden torches, which had lighted her childish steps on 
her first night at Felicite. 

There were two ways to her own chamber. One way, the 
usual and shortest one, was encumbered by some pictures and 
statues that were being moved to another corridor. She took 
the longer way, which led through the body of the house to the 
left wing of it, in which her own rooms were, by her choice, for 
the sake of the view down the sea-coast and north- ward. 

Going this way, she passed the stately guest-chambers which 
had been allotted to the Duchesse de Sonnaz. 

The lamps in the long gallery burned low; her footfall made 
no sound on the carpet, she passed on silently as the ghost to 
which her husband impatiently likened her. She was thinking 
neither of him nor of her guests: she was thinking how long her 
life in all likelihood would be, since she was young, and how 
lonely! Since she was thinking, “ He bade me keep myself un- 
spotted from the world; it shall never be he who lowers me.” 

Suddenly a strong ray of light shone across her feet. She was 
passing a half-opened door — a door that had been shut with a 
careless hand, and had re-opened. The curtains within were 
parted a little; as she passed, she could not tell why, her eyes 
were drawn to the mellow light shining between the tapestries. 

It was the door of Jeanne de Sonnaz. Through the space Yere 
aaw into the room, and saw her husband. 

For a moment she made a step forward to enter and front them. 
The blood leaped into her face; all the pride in her, outraged and 
disgusted, sprang up in arms under the last and worst of insults. 
Then with a strong effort she thrust the door to, that others 
should not see what she had seen — that she should screen his dis- 
honor, if he would not — and passed on, unseen and unheard by 
those within, to her own room. When she reached it she trem- 
bled from head to foot, but it was with rage. 

She came of a bold race, who had never lightly brooked insult, 
though she had long borne its burden patiently, because duty was 
stronger with her than pride. She sat down and drew paper and 
pens to her, and wrote three lines; 


MOTHS. 327 

“ Either I or the Dnchesse de Sonnaz leaves Felicite to-morrow before 
Boon. 

“(Signed) Vera, Princess Zotjroff.” 

She sealed the note, and gave it to her woman for the prince. 

“ You will give it to Ivan: he will give it to his master in the 
morning,” she said, as they were leaving the room. She was 
still careful of his dignity, as he was not. That night she did 
not sleep. 

At sunrise they brought her a letter from her husband. It said 
only, “ Do what you please. You cannot suppose I shall insult 
- my friend for you. — Zouroff.” 

“His friend 1” said Yere, with a bitter smile. She recalled 
memories of her life in Paris and at Svir— recalled so many hints, 
so many glances, so many things that she had attached no mean- 
ing to, which now were clear as day. She remembered the 
warning of Correze. 

“ He, too. must have known!” she thought; and her face burn- 
ed to think that the man who loved her should be aware of all 
the outrage passed on her by the man who owned her. 

“ The prince asks an answer,” they said, at her door. 

“ There is no answer,” said Yere, and added to her women, 
“ Bring me a little tea, and then leave me.” 

They thought she wished to sleep, and suspected nothing else. 
Left to herself, she gathered up some needful tilings with her 
own hands, the first thing she had ever done for herself since the 
old simple days at Bulmer. She put together the jewels her own 
family had given her, shut the shattered necklace of the moth 
and the star up with them in a casket, and put on the plainest 
clothes she had. She was ready to leave his house now and for- 
ever. She would take nothing with her that was his or that had 
been hers by his give. Of the future she had no clear thought: 
all that she was resolved upon was that no other night should 
find herself and Jeanne de Sonnaz under the same roof. 

All the house Avas quiet. No one had risen except herself. She 
waited, because she did not choose to go out like one in hiding, 
Or ashamed, from her own home. She intended to leave the 
place in full daylight and publicity. The world could say what 
it liked, but it could not then say she had left secretly, and the 
shame v aid be for those who merited it. Without and within 
all was s ill. The sea had scarce a sound, no breeze stirred in 
the trees, the silvery haze that heralded a hot day was over land 
and water. She stood at the window and looked out, and a 
quiet tranquillity came over her. She was about to leave it all 
forever, all the pomp and the splendor, all the monotony and the 
feverishness, all the burden of rank, and the weariness of pleas- 
ure. She would soon be alone and poor. She was not afraid. 
She would go into the dim green German country, and live in 
some man-forgotten place, and get her bread in some way. She 
was not afraid. Only all the world should know where she went, 
and why. All the world should know she was alone. 

She stood beside the open casement with the dog beside her; he 
would be her sole companion in the loneliness to which she 
Would go. Correze — she thought of Correze, but, with the stern® 


323 


MOTHS . 


ness which is apt to exist in very pure and very proud natures, 
she thought only, “ If he come to me when I live alone, he too 
will be a coward !” 

And as a coward she would treat him, she thought; for her 
heart was but half awake still, and of passion she yet knew but 
little, and what she knew she feared as a thing unclean. 

Suddenly her door w^s burst open; her husband entered; his 
eyes were bloodshot, his face was black with fury. 

“Are you mad?” he cried to her, as he saw her traveling jewel 
case and the locked valise and casket. 

She looked at him with a grand dignity upon her face, as 
though she saw something leprous and loathsome. 

“ I gave you your choice,” she said, in a voice that vibrated 
with restrained wrath. “ You took your choice.” 

She pointed to his letter that lay open on the table. 

“ And I tell you that neither you nor she shall go out of my 
house!” he swore, with a great oath. “ You shall receive her, 
smile on her, sit at the same table with her, please her in all 
things as I do. She is the only woman that I never tire of, the 
only woman that contents me ” 

“Tell Paul de Sonnaz so; not me.” 

Her husband’s face grew terrible and hideous in the convulsions 
of his rage. 

“ He! he is not a fool like you; he knows what the world is 
and women are. By Christ, how dare you? — how dare you 
speak to me of him or her? I am my own master, and I am 
yours. Sooner than let you insult my friends for one moment, 
I would fling you from this window in the sea.” 

“ I know that. It is I who go, she who remains.” 

“ As God lives, neither of you shall go. What! you think I 
shall allow such a scandal as my wife’s departure from under 
my roof?” 

“ I shall not allow such an outrage as for Madame de Sonnaz 
to be under your roof with me.” 

She spoke firmly and in a low tone and without violence. 
Something in her tone from its very calmness subdued and 
abashed him for an instant: but his hesitation scarcely lasted 
more than that. “ Madame de Sonnaz is my guest — my honored 
guest,” he said, passionately. “ I will not have her affronted. I 
will not have a breath on her name. What! you will make a 
scene that will ring through all Europe: you will go out of my 
house when my friends are in it! you will make yourself and 
her and me the by-words of society! Never, by heaven! You 
are my wife, and as my wile you stay.” 

Yere, who was very pale and as cold as though the summer 
morning were a winter’s day, remained quite calm. By great 
effort she restrained her bitter rage, her boundless scorn. But he 
changed her resolve in nothing. “I stay if Madame de Sonnaz 
go,” she said, between her teeth. “ If she stay, I go. I told 
you to chooser you did choose.” 

Sergius Zouroff forgot that he was a gentleman, and all that 
was of manliness in bun perished ea his frenzy. He raised his 

arm and struck her. She staggered, and fell against the marble 

— 


r MOTHS. 


829 


of the console by which she stood, but no cry escaped her; she 
recovered herself and stood erect, a little stunned, but with no 
fear upon her face. 

“You have all your rights now,” he 'cried, brutally, with a 
rough laugh that covered his shame at his own act. “You car 
divorce me, Madame la Princesse: ‘ infidelity sous la conjugal , 
violence personellej and all the rest: you have all your rights. 
The law will be with you.” 

“I shall not divorce you,” said Vere, while the great pain of 
the blow, which bad fallen on her breast, ached and throbbed 
through all her body. “ I shall not divorce you; 1 do not take 
my wrongs into the shame of public courts; but — I go— or — she 
goes.” 

An exceeding faintness came over her, and she was forced to 
sit down lest she should fall again, and the air around her grew 
dark and seemed full of noise. Zouroff rang loudly for her 
woman. 

“The princess fell against the marble — an accident; she has 
fainted,” he said, hurriedly, and he escaped from the chamber. 
In a few moments he was with Jeanne de Sonnaz. In the utter 
weakness of his submission to the domination which she had ob- 
tained over him, he had grown so used to seek counsels in all 
things and at all times that he told her all now. Pier rage ex- 
tinguished his own, as one fire swallows up another. 

“ Oh, imbecile!” she screamed at him. “ If Paul hear — if the 
world know — I am lost forever!” 

He stared at her with gloomy amaze. 

“Paul knows; society too: they always have known ” 

“ Oh, madman!” she yelled at him, with her shining eyes all 
aflame. “ They have known, certainly, but they could still seem 
not to know, and did so. Now, if once it be a public scandal, 
Paul will act, and the world will be with him ! Good God ! If 
your wife leaves the house for me, I am ruined forever!” 

“ I have given her what will keep her still.” 

“You are a brute; you were always a brute. That is nothing 
new. But your wife you do not know. She will get up though 
she is dying, and go, now she once knows, now she has once said 
that she will not stay where I am. Wait, wait, wait! you imbe- 
cile! Let me think: your wife must not go. For her sake! no! 
good heavens, no! — for mine.” 

Sergius Zouroff stood passive and uncomplaining under the 
torrent of her abuse. 

“A scandal, a story for the papers, a cause for the tribunals; 
good heavens! have you and I lived all these years only to fall 
into such helpless folly at the last?” she shrieked at him. “ Why 
did you have me come here? Paul will take Berthe and Claire away, 
if he do no more. Oh, you madman! why did you not show me 
your wife’s note before you went to her? She is right, sha is 
always, right, and you were a brute to strike her; but she wants 
her divorce, of course, why not? she loves Correze, and is a wom- 
an afraid of sin. But she shall not go; she must not go; I will 
go sooner ” 

*•' You shall never go for her.” 


330 


MOTHS. 


“ I shall go for myself. You are a brute, you are an idiot; yo* 
understand nothing. I will be summoned. Paul can be ill, or 
Builhieres on fire — something, anything, so that no one knows.” 

“ You shall not go; she will humilate me; she will think ” 

“What do I care for your humiliation? I care to avert my 
own. Pshaw ! Do you suppose I would stay an hour in this 
house if your wife were out of it ? Do you suppose I would risk 
my good name and make myself a scandal to the Faubourg ? 
Good heavens ! how little you know me after all these years ! I 
shall obey your wife and go ; she is the soul of honor in L:er own 
odd way. She will say nothing if I go. My name shall not serve 
her as a chisel to cut her fetters. Oh, what fools men are, what 
dolts, what mules ! Why could you not bring her note to me, 
and ask me what to do ? Instead you must go and strike her. Do 
you suppose her women will not know? An accident. Who believes 
in accidents ? All the house will know it before noon. Oh, imbe- 
cile ! You would marry a young saint, a creature from another 
world, it was sure to end like this. Go, go ! or my women will 
see you, and it will be worse ; go, and in a minute or two I shall 
send you word t 1 ' ^ ‘ ^ * Thank you? no, why 



should I thank 


cruel to your wife or 


strike her ; I always bade you treat her as a saint. She is one, 

though how long ” 

“ I struck her because she insulted you.” 

“ She was right enough to insult me ; she is more right still 
when she insults you. Now go 1” 

With sullen subjection he went ; he learned what gratitude 
was from the women of his world. In half an hour’s time there 
was some confusion in the well-ordered household of Felicite, for 
the Duchesse de Sonnaz, her children, their servants and her own, 
w ere departing in hot haste : it was said that Monsieur le Due 
was lying ill of sunstroke* at their chateau of Ruilhieres, in the 
department of Morbihan. 


Lying sick and blind on her bed, Vere heard the sound of the 
horses’ feet. 

“ It is Madame la Duchesse who is leaving,” said her maid, who 
from the other side of the closed door had heegrd all that had 
passed between Sergius ^ourofi: and his wife. 

Vere said nothing. 

It v r as the first day of shooting ; there was a great breakfast, 
to wdiich many sportsmen of the neighborhood came ; there were 
battues on a large scale in the woods ; there were noise and move- 
ment and the sound of many steps throughout the chateau, and 
out on the terrace, under her windows : now and then she heard 
her husband’s voice ; then after a while all was still ; there was the 
echo of distant shots from the woods, that was all. The day 
wore aw’ay. Her women told the ladies of the house-party that 
the princess had a severe headache from a fall. 

Toward evening she rose and was dressed. The pain had 
lulled in a measure, and the faintness had passed away. She 
wished to avoid comment, to cover the departure of Jeanne de 
Sonnaz. Under the pale-yellow roses of the bouquet at ller bosom 
there was a broad* black bruise. The evening passed as usual. 


MOTHS. 


331 


Tlie house-party suspected nothing. V ere’s women were discreet, 
and the surprise, the sorrow, the bewilderment of Jeanne de Son- 
naz at what she had said were the sudden tidings from Ruilhieres 
had been so natural, that the few people who had seen her at her 
departure had been deceived into beheving those tidings true. 
The evening passed smoothly; a little operetta in the little 
theater filled two of its hours, and if the mistress of Felicite 
looked pale and spoke little, she often did that. Zouroff never 
looked at his wife and never addressed her. But that also was 
not rare enough to be any matter for notice. 

Vere underwent the fatigue of the night without faltering, 
though she was in physical pain, and at times a sickly sense of 
faintness came over her. 

She was thankful when the men went to the smoking-room, 
the women to their bedchambers, and she was free to be alone at 
rest. On the table in her own room there lay a letter. She 
shuddered a little, for she recognized the loose, rude handwriting 
of her husband. She was tired of pain and of insult, and she 
had little hope of any other thing. 

She sat down and read it. 

“You have had your own way,” he wrote to her. “ The only 
woman whom I care for has been driven away by you. Do not 
suppose you have gained any victory; you will pay the cost of the 
affront you have dared to pass on her. I shall not speak to you 
again if we meet here a thousand times. I wish to avoid scandal 
for the present at least, not for your sake, but -or hers. Sol 
write to you now. You were about to leave this house. You 
will leave it. As soon as this circle of guests breaks up, the day 
after to-morrow, you will leave it. You will go to an estate of 
mine in Poland, Waldricin and Ivan will accompany you, and 
you can take your women, of course. There you will remain. If 
you wish to escape, you can sue me for a divorce. Whenever 
you do so, I shall not oppose it. 

“(Signed) Sergixjs Nicolaivitch, 

“Prince Zoueoff.” 


CHAPTER XXVI. 

In one of the most desolate parts of the country of Poland there 
were vast estates of the Princes Zouroff, conferred on them at 
the time of the partition of that unhappy land between Christian 
sovereigns. They were vast, lonely districts, with villages few 
and scantily populated — immense plains of grain and grassland 
swamps of reedy wildernesses, and dim, sandy forests of pines, 
straight, and colorless, and mournful. 

In the heart of all these— whose yield made up no slight sum 
in the immense riches of the Russian princes who owned them 
and spent their produce on the pavements of Paris and St. Peters- 
burg — there stood a large, lofty building, which had been once a 
fortified monastery and had served for a century as the scarce 
ever visited castle of the Zouroffs. 

It was of immense extent. It had no architectural beauty, 
and from its many narrow windows there was no outlook except 


332 


MOTHS . 


on one side to the interminable woods of pine, and on the other 
over the plains and marshes through which a sullen, yellow river 
crept. Within it was decorated as it had been decorated by Ivan 
Zouroff at the time of the abdication of Stanislas Augustus. 

From the gay, gorgeous interior and the sunlit gardens and 
sea-terraces of the Norman chateau, Sergius Zouroff sent his 
wife to this place, amidst the desolation of Poland, then bleed- 
ing afresh from the terrorism that strove to stamp out the Nihil- 

Vere left Felicite without protest. Felicite was hers by settle- 
ment, but she did not urge that fact. She accepted the com- 
mands of her husband, and traveled across Europe in almost un- 
broken silence, accompanied by the attendants he had selected, 
by her women, and by the dog Loris. 

She arrived at Szarisla late one evening, and, despite the fires, 
the lights, the torches in the courts, the large household assem- 
bled in the entrance, a chill like that of the catacombs seemed 
around her, and she felt that living she entered a grave. 

When she had read her husband’s letter, her first impulse had 
been to refuse, and to disobey him— to go away with her own 
jewels, and no single thing of his, and gain her own bread in 
some way in solitude, as she had intended to do if Jeanne de Son- 
naz had remained in her house. Then, on later and calmer 
thought, she accepted the banishment to Poland. Her pride 
made her willing to avoid all scandal, her principle made her 
deem it still right to obey her husband. She had asked him once 
to let her live on his estates, out of the world; she considered 
she had the request granted, though in a savage and bitter way. 
As to the condition that he made her return dependent on, she 
lifted her head, and drew her head erect, with the haughty re- 
solve that she was capable of when stung and roused. Sooner 
than receive Jeanne de Sonnaz in her house, or ever salute her 
as a friend, she said to herself that she would live and die on the 
Polish plains. She did not answer; she did not protest or rebuke; 
she neither wrote not spoke to her husband in the fortnight that 
followed; she entertained her guests with her usual calm, cold 
grace, and when the last of them had left, and the day of her 
departure arrived, she went away tranquilly, as though she went 
of her own will, and in her own way, taking the dog Loris. 

Zouroff had not been surprised. 

Though he could ill appreciate her character, he did not misun- 
derstand it. “ She may break, she will never bend,” he thought, 
as, careful always of the outside observances of courtesy, he bade 
her a courtly farewell before his household. 

“ I am his prisoner!” she thought, as a week later she entered 
the austere gloom of Szarisla. But sooner than release herself on 
the terms he offered, she said in her heart that Poland should be 
her tomb, as it had been that of so many martyrs. Martyrs to 
an idea, the world said of those. It would have said the same of 
her. 

To her mother, and her friends, and all society, Sergius Zouroff 
explained that his wife had long asked him to allow her to pass 
gome months on his Northern estates, to establish a school and 


MOTHS. 


333 


improve the moral condition of the peasantry, and at last he had 
consented; it was an insanity, he added, but an innocent one; she 
was a saint. 

“Alas! alas! what has happened?” thought his sister, “what 
has happened? Oh, why was I not at Felicite!” 

But she was the only one who feared or wondered; the Prin- 
cess Vera had always been so strange, and she was a saint. 

To Jeanne de Sonnaz alone Zouroff said, with his gloomy eyes 
full of somber ferocity, “ Je voas venge .” 

Tq her sister-in-law, and to the few to whom she ever wrote, 
Vere said always in her brief letters, “ I am tired of the world, 
as you know; I am glad of this retreat. It is desolate and very 
dull, but it is peace.” 

Madame Nelaguine, her eyes sparkling with rage, and all her 
little person erect in indignant dignity, reproached her brother 
in a torrent of rebuke and censure. “ I imagine very well what 
happened,” she said to him. “You would have Jeanne de Sonnaz 
under the same roof with Vere.” 

“Respect my friend’s name,” said Zouroff, with savage au- 
thority, “or you and I never meet again. Vere is a saint, you 
say. Well, she has her wish; she goes into retreat. Would it 
please you better if she were living with Correze ?” 

“Correze! he is nothing to her!” said Madame Nelaguine, 
hotly. 

Zouroff shrugged his shoulders. “Some think otherwise,” he 
answered. 

“You are a brute, and you are a coward — a malignant coward!” 
said his sister. “You outrage your wife in every way, and you 
must even dare to soil her innocence with suspicion.” 

“If it be suspicion only, time will show,” said Zouroff. “Go 
and live at Szarisla yourself, if you pity my wife so much.” 

But Madame Nelaguine, who loved the world and could not 
live without its excitements and its intrigues, could not face that 
captivity in the Polish plain, though all the heart she had in her 
yearned towards her brother’s wife. 

“ Will you imprison her all her life?” she cried. 

Zouroff answered, with impatience and fatigue, “She will re- 
main there until she receives my friend with respect.” 

“You are a brute,” said his sister, once more. 

“ I protect Jeanne, and I avenge her,” said Zouroff, obstinately. 
He fancied that his honor was involved in this defense of his 
mistress. 

“Jeanne!” echoed his sister, with unutterable scorn. “You 
might as well defend and avenge your quadroon!” 

But she knew very well that she might as well seek to shake 
the Ural Mountains at their base as to change the obstinacy of 
her brother. 

Jeanne de Sonnaz had gained the empire over him of a re- 
awakened passion— the empire of a strong woman over an in- 
dolent man, of a mistress once deserted, and so doubly tenacious 
of her hold. There was no beauty in her and no youth; but she 
had the secret of dominion over men. She cowed this tyrant, she 
subdued this man, in whom the self-wiU^of long self-indulgenoe 


834 


MOTHS. 


was joined to the feebleness and inertnc ...... of the bxc 

temperament; she railed at him, jeered at him, commanded him, 
yet fascinated him. He knew her to be worthless, faithless, 
never wholly his or wholly any one’s, yet she held him., “ After 
all, she is the woman I have loved best,” he said to himself, and 
believed it, because she had the gift of exciting all that was worst 
in him, and subduing his fierce impulses to her own will and 
i rm.” 

Yv tien he had married, Jeanne de Sonnaz, who beyond all 
things valued her position and loved the world, had kept her 
peace, because she did not choose to jeopardize her name or gain 
the ridicule of her society. But she had always said to herself, 
“ Je me vengerai .” 

She kept her word. 

Vere was in her captivity at Szarisla; and the Duchesse de 
Sonnaz — moving from one chateau to another, and entertaining 
circles of guests for the shooting at their own mighty place of 
Ruilhieres — said easily in the ear of the two or three great ladies 
who were her most intimate associates: that there had been a 
scene at Felicite; she had tried to mediate between her old friend 
and his wife, but vainly, so far as peace went; Zouroff had for- 
bidden the princess to receive Correze, and Correze had been 
found there at evening in the gardens: oh, there was nothing 
serious — Vera was a young saint — but all the same there had 
been a scene, and Zouroff had sent his wife to Szarisla. 

Then the two or three whom she told told others, and so the 
tale ran, and grew as it ran, and was believed. The world was 
satisfied that the Princess Zouroff was en 'penitence in Poland. 

“ I think they were lovers many years ago. I remember, when 
she was a mere child, seeing her in a boat with Correze; she had 
come from Havre with him; her mother was distracted. I sup- 
pose Zouroff and the Nelaguine knew nothing of it,” said the 
Princess Helene Olgarousky, who made one of the brilliant 
autumn party at Ruilhieres, where Zouroff was not. 

“Be sensible, mon ami,” had said the Duchesse Jeanne; “now 
your wife is away I cannot receive you; it would not do. Oh, 
m winter, when we are all in Paris again, you may come and see 
Paul as usual. But stay at Ruilhieres you will not; no — no — no! 
Three times, No!” 

She had no beauty, and no youth, she had no heart, and no 
conscience; she had been his friend for fifteen years, and he 
usually tired of any woman in less than fifteen days. Yet 
Sergius Zouroff chafed at the interdiction to stay at Ruilhieres, 
as though he were eighteen and she seen but an hour before, and 
found himself waiting with impatience for the moment of his 
return to Paris, with a vague sense that without this woman life 
was stupid, empty, and purposeless. 

He missed the goad to his senses and his temper with which 
she knew so well how to guide him, as the tamed elephant turn- 
ed loose misses the prick of the mahout's steel. But she, who 
knew that the elephant too long left to himself turns wild and 
comes never again to his mahout’s call, took care not to leave 
Zouroff too much to himself. When the first shooting-party 

■ 


MOTHS. 


335 


broke up at Ruilhieres, she left Due Paul with some men to slay 
the pheasants, and went, for the sake of little Claire, who was 
not strong, to Arcachon and to Biarritz. 

There Zouroff went occasionally when she would allow him. 
He went alone. He would no more have dared to take the 
mulattress or any other newer toy within sight of Jeanne de Son- 
naz, now, than he would have dared to take them into his Tsar- 
ina’s presence. 

He had insulted his wife, but he dared not insult his mistress. . 
She spoke to him often of his wife. 

‘‘ You cannot keep Vera in Poland all winter,” she said one 
day in the fragrant alleys of Arcachon, while Berthe and Claire 
played before them with little silk balloons. 

“ I shall do so,” he said, gloomily. 

“ Impossible! They will call you a tyrant, an ogre, a fiend. 
You must have her in Paris.” 

“Not unless she receives you.” 

“Do not make me ridiculous, I beg of you,” she said, with 
some impatience. “ You mean, if she will consent not to receive 
Correze.” 

Zouroff was silent. He knew that he did not mean that. 
But it was the fiction which his ruler had set up between 
them. 

“ That is why you have sent her to Szarisla,” continued Jeanne 
de Sonnaz. “ All the world knows that, though of course we 
put a fair face on it. The idea of talking of her not receiving 
me! If she did not receive me, Paul would have to shoot you, 
which would have its inconveniences — for you and Paul.” 

She laughed a little and impaled a blue butterfly on the sharp 
point of her tortoise-shell cane. Zouroff still said nothing; a sort 
of vague remorse touched him for a moment, as little Claire, 
whose balloon was entangled in a shrub, cried out, “Where is 
the princess ? Why is she never with us now ? She would get 
down my balloon. You are too cross.” 

Zouroff released the toy, and said, roughly, “Run to your 
sister. Claire; you tease us.” 

“ Madame Vera never said I teased,” said the child, sullenly, 
with a pout, as she obeyed, and joined her elder sister. 

“ Where is Correze ?” said her mother. 

“ Nom empeste ! ” swore Zouroff, “how should I know where 
a singer may be.” 

“ It is very easy to know where a great singer is. Comets are 
watched and chronicled. He was shooting in Styria, at 
Prince Hohenlohe’s, last month. Why do you not know? Do 
you have no reports from Szarisla?” 

“He is not there,” said Zouroff, angrily. He hated his wife, 
but he was jealous of her honor, even though it would, in a 
sense, have gratified him to be able to say to her, “You are no 
higher than the rest.” 

“ He may not be there,” said the Duchesse de Sonnaz, careless- 
ly. “ On the other hand, it is not very far from Styria kf Poland, 
and he is singing nowhere in public this autumn. Are your re- 
ports to be trusted?” 


336 


MOTHS. 


“Ivan would tell me anything,” said Zouroff, moodily. “He 
writes me weekly of her health; he says nothing happens; no 
one goes ” 

“ Ivan is incorruptible, no doubt,” said Jeanne de Sonnaz, a 
little dryly. 

‘ ‘ What do you mean?” 

“You are always asking me what I mean. I am no sphinx, 
my dear friend, I am very transparent. I mean that, since your 
wife is there, it seems to me improbable that she does not, or 
will not, see Correze ” 

Zouroff ground his heel on the turf with impatience, but he 
kept silent. 

“I think it would be worth your while to make sure that she 
does not see Correze. I am quite aware that, if they do meet, it 
will be merely a knight meeting a saint — 

‘ Pauvres couples, a l’ame haute, 

Qu’une noble horreur de la faute 
Empeche seuin d’etre heureux ’ — 

and that he will 

‘ Baise s& main sans la presser, 

Comme un lis facile a blesser 

Qui tremble a la moindre secousse ’ — 

and all the rest. But still, if only as a moral phenomenon, it 
might be worth watching, and Ivan, on whom you depend, is, 
though a very superior servant, still only a servant.” 

“What would you have me to do? Uo myself?” 

“Yes, I think you should go ymirself. It would prevent 
people saying unpleasant things or untrue ones. You must have 
your wife back in Paris, or you must be very certain of all that 
passes at Szarisla, or you may be made to play a foolish part — a 
part you would not like to play, when you have shut your wife 
up in it for her safety.” 

‘ Jeanne,” said Zouroff, gloomily, with his eyes fixed on the 
turf they were treading, “there is no one to hear, and we may 
speak as we mean: Vera does not return to me until she consents 
to receive you; there is no question of her honor; she will have 
that intact as if she were in a convent; she is made like that; 
she is no * lis facile a blesser ,’ she is made of steel. She knows 
everything, and she will no longer know you. To protect your 
name I exiled her. She may live and die in Poland.” 

She heard him, knowing very well that he said the simple fact, 
yet her eyes grew angry and her teeth shut tight. 

“You are all imbeciles, you Russians,” she said, contemptu- 
ously. “You have only one remedy for all diseases — Siberia. 
It does not cure all diseases : Nihilism shows that. Correze is 
your best friend, since you want to be free.” 

“ If he set foot in Szarisla he shall be beaten with rods.” 

Jeanne de Sonnaz, as they passed under the tamarisk-trees, 
looked at him coldly, and crossed her hands lightly on her gold- 
headed cane as she leaned on it. 

“ On my word I do not understand you. Are you in love with 
your wife?” 


MOTHS. 


88 ? 


44 Jeanne !” 

“ I do not accept divided homage,” said his friend, with close- 
shut teeth; “ and jealousy is a form of homage— perhaps the 
truer form.” 

“ One may be jealous of one’s honor ” 

“You have none,” said Jeanne de Sonnaz, coolly. “Your 
wife told you so long ago. You have rank, but you have not 
honor. You do not know what it means. My poor Paul does, 
but then he is stupid and arriere. I think if I told Paul to kill 
you it might perhaps arrange things; and then how happy they 
would be, these 

* Purs amants sur terre egares!’ ” 

Zouroff looked at her fixedly; his face grew anxious, sullen, 
and pale. 

“ Jeanne, say out; what is it you want me to do?” 

“I want to reconcile your wife and you, of course,” said 
Jeanne de Sonnaz, driving her cane through the yielding turf. 
“ That, of course, first of all, if possible. If impossible, I would 
have you divorced from her. Things, as they are, are ridiculous; 
and,” she added, in a lower breath, as the children and their bal- 
loons drew near, running against the wind, “they may in time 
compromise me, which I do not choose to permit.” 

Zouroff understood what she required of him; and he felt a 
coward and a brute, as his sister had called him. 

The lily might not be easy to bruise, but it was easy to soil it. 

“ Correze is certainly in Styria,” she added, as the children 
joined them. 

Zouroff stood looking down on the green turf and the bright 
blossoms of the asters with moody eyes; he was thinking, what 
beast of prey was ever so hard of grip, so implacable in appetite, 
as a cruel woman? And yet this woman held him. 

He dared not disobey, because he could not bear to lose her. 

That autumn day, so sunny, balmy, and radiant in the sheltered 
gardens and forests of Arcachon, was winter at Szarisla. Sud- 
den stoi ms and heavy falls of snow had made the forests bare, 
the plains white; the winds were hurricanes, the thermometer 
was at zero, and the wolves ranged the lonely plateaus and moor- 
lands in bands, hungered and rash. Szarisla in autumn was 
colder and drearier than Felicite could ever be in mid- winter, 
and the great bare pile of castle buildings rose black and somber 
from out the unbroken world of whiteness. 

There was an equally unchangeable melancholy around; it 
was in the midst of a district intensely and bitterly national; the 
Princes Zouroff were among the most accursed names of Poland, 
and the few far-scattered nobles who dwelt in the province would 
no more have crossed the threshold of Szarisla than they would 
have kissed the cheek of Mouravieff or the foot of the Hospodar. 
Yere lived in absolute solitude, and knew that it was as virtu- 
ally also a captivity as was ever that of Mary or of Arabella Stuart. 

Of course she was the Princess Vera, the mistress of Szarisla 
nominally and actually, but none the less she knew that every 
hour was patched, that every word was listened to, and that, 


338 


♦ MOTHS . 


whilst there, y ?2s obsequious deference to ad her commands, yet 
had she expressed a wish to leave the place she would have been 
reverentially entreated to await the wishes of the prince, and 
would not have found a man in her stables bold enough to harness 
her horses for her flight. 

Szarisla was an absolute solitude. The nearest to zn was a 
three days’ journey of long, bad roads; and the town, when 
reached, was an obscure and miserable place. The peasantry 
were sullen and disaffected. The district was under the iron heel 
of a hated governor, and its scanty population was mute in use- 
less and gloomy resentment. She had no friend, no society, no 
occupation save such as she chose to make for herself; she was 
waited upon with frigid ceremonial and etiquette, and she was 
conscious that she was watched incessantly. Many women would 
have lost their senses, their health, or both, in that bitter weari- 
ness of blank, chill, silent days. 

Vere, whose childish training now stood her in fair stead and 
service, summoned all her courage, all her pride, and resisted the 
depression that was like a malady, the lassitude that might be 
the precursor of mental or bodily disease. She rode constantly, 
till the snow fell; when the snow came, and the frost, she had 
the wild young horses put in the sleigh, and drove for leagues 
through the pine woods and over the moorlands. Air and move- 
ment were, she knew, the only true physicians. Little by little 
she made her way into the homes and into the hearts of the sus- 
picious and disaffected peasantry, it was slow work, and hard, 
and thankless, but she was not easily discouraged or rebuffed. 
She could do little, for she was met at all times in her wishes for 
charity by the adamantine barrier of “ The prince forbids it”; she 
had no more power, as she bitterly realized, than if she had been 
his serf. But all that personal influence could do, she did ; and 
that was not little. She was the first living creature who had 
borne the name of Zouroff that had not been loathed and cursed 
at Szarisla. 

Personal beauty is a rare sorcery, and when the fair face of the 
Princess Vera looked on them through the falling snow in the 
forests, or the dim light of their own wood cabins, the people 
could not altogether shut their hearts to her, though she bore the 
accursed name. 

She was very unhappy, wearily and hopelessly so, because she 
saw no possibility of any other life than the captivity here, or 
the yet more arduous captivity of the great world, and in her 
memory she always heard the song; 

“ Si vous saviez que je vous aime, 

Surtout si vous saviez comment?” 

But she would not let her sorrow and her pain make slaves 
of her. 

The wild and frequent storms of wind and snow tried her most 
hardly, because they mewed her in those gloomy rooms and sun- 
less corridors which had seen so much human tyranny and human 
woe, and the long, black nights, when only the howl of the hur- 
ricane and the howl of the wolves were heard, were very terrible; 


MOTHS, 


839 


she would walk up and down the paneled rooms through those 
midnight hours, that seemed like an eternity, and wonder if her 
husband had wished to drive Lei mad that he had sent her here. 
Her French women left her, unable to bear the cold, the dreari- 
ness, the loneliness; she had only Russians and Poles about her. 
At times in those lonely, ghastly nights, made hideous by the 
moans of the beasts and the roar of the wicds, she thought of 
the opera-house of Paris, she thought of the faee of Faust. Then 
in that emptiness and darkness of her life she began to realize 
that she loved Correze, began to understand all that she cost to 
him in pain and vain regret. 

If she would receive Jeanne de Sonnaz, she could go back — go 
back to the splendor, the color, the light of life, go back to the 
world where Correze reigned, where his voice was heard, where 
his eyes would answer hers. But it never once occurred to her 
to yield. 

Now and then the truth came to her mind that Sergius 
Zouroff had sent her to this solitude not only as a vengeance, but 
as a temptation. Then all the strength in her repelled the very 
memory of Correze. 

“ Would my husband make me like Jeanne de Sonnaz,” she 
thought, with a shudder of disgust, “ so that I may no longer 
have the right to scorn her?” 

And she strove with all her might to keep her mind calm and 
tdear, her body in health, her sympathies awake for other sor- 
rows than her own. 

She studied the dead languages, which she had half forgotten, 
With the old priest of Szarisla, and conjured away the visions 
that assailed her in those endless and horrible nights, with the 
sonorous cadence of the Greek poets, and in the daytime, when 
the frost had made the white world firm under foot, passed al- 
most all the hours of light sending her fiery horses through the 
glittering and rarefied air. 

So the months passed, and it was mid-winter. Letters and 
journals told her that the gay world went on its course, but to 
her it seemed as utterly alien as it could do to any worker in the 
depths of the salt, or quicksilver-mines that supplied his wealth 
to Prince Zouroff. The world had already forgotten her. So- 
ciety only said, “ Princess Vera is passing the winter in Poland; 
so eccentric; but she was always strange and a saint;” and then, 
with the usual little laugh, society added, “Thr j is something 
about Correze.” 

But the world does not long talk, even calu aniously, of what 
is absent. 

Prince Zouroff was on the boulevards; he gave his usual great 
dinners; he played as usual at his clubs; he entered his horses as 
usual for great races; the world did not concern itself largely 
about his wife. 

; She was in Poland. 

She committed the heaviest sin against society, the.only one it 
never pardons. She was absent. No one had even the consr T > 
tion to think that she nad her lover with her. 

Correze was singing in Berlin. 


840 


MOTHS. 


Madame Nelaguine, forcing herself to do what she loathed, 
went across Europe in the cold, wet weather as swiftly as she 
could travel, and visited Szarisla. 

She strove to persuade her sister-in-law to accept the inevitable* 
and return to the Hotel Zouroff and such consolations as the 
great world and its homage could contain. 

“ Be reasonable, Vera,” she urged, with the tears standing in 
her keen, marmoset-like eyes. “My dear, society is made up 
of women like Jeanne de Sonnaz. Receive her; what does it 
matter? It is not as if you loved your husband, as if your heart 
were wounded. Receive her; what will it cost you? You need 
never even see her in intimacy. Go to her on her days; let her 
come to you on yours. Show yourself half an hour at her balls; 
let her show herself at yours. "That is all. What does it amount 
to? what does it cost ? Nothing.” 

“Little, no doubt,” answered Vere. “Only — all one’s self- 
respect.” 

And she was not to be changed or persuaded. 

“ I shall live and die here, very likely,” she said, at last, weary 
of resistance. “It is as well as any other place. It is better 
than Paris. Your brother has sent me here to coerce me. Go 
back and tell him that force will not succeed with me. Iam not 
a coward.” 

Madame Nelaguine, grieved and yet impatient, shuddered, and 
left the bleakness and loneliness of Vere’s prison-house with re- 
lief, and hurried back to the world and its ways, and said im 
petuously and bitfcterly to her brother, “ Do not darken my 
doors, Sergius, while your wife is shut in that jail of ice. Do 
not come to me, do not speak to me. You are a brute. Would 
to Heaven Jeanne de Sonnaz were your wife! then you would be 
dealt with aright. Are you mad? Do you wish to make her 
faithless? Can you think she will bear such a life as that? Can 
you leave a woman as young as she without friends, lovers, chil- 
dren, and expect her to change to snow, like the country you shut 
her in? Are you mad? If she shame herself there any way — any 
way — can you blame her? Can you take a girl, a child, and teacH 
her what the passions of men are, and then bid her lead a nun s 
life just when she has reached the full splendor and force of hei 
womanhood ” 

“ She is a saint, you say,” he answered, with a bitter smile, 
and parted from his sister in fierce anger. In the boudoir of the 
Faubourg St. Germain his friend knew well how to surround 
him with an influence which little by little isolated him and 
alienated him from all who had the courage to speak of his wife. 

Jeanne de Sonnaz had one set purpose, the purpose which she 
had let him see in her at Arcachon; and until she should suc- 
ceed in it she suffered no hand but her own to guide him. 

The lily might have a stem of steel and never be bent, but it 
could be broken. 

Soilless though it might remain in its solitude amidst the snow 
it should be broken ; she had said it in her soul. 

“ Ge que femme veut, Vhomme veut” was the proverb as her ex* 
perience read it. 


MOTHS. 


341 


All that there had been of manliness in Sergius Zourofif’s nature 
resisted^her still in this thing that she sought ; he still had a faith 
in his wife that his anger against her did not change ; in his eyes 
Yere was purity incarnate, and he could have laughed aloud in 
the face of suspicion. To ruin by open doubt and calumnious ac- 
cusations a creature he knew to be sinless, seemed to him so vile 
that he could not bring himself to do an act so base. 

He sent her into captivity, and he kept her there without 
mercy, but to hem her m with falsehood, to dishonor her by af- 
fected belief in her dishonor, was a lower deep than he could 
stoop to, even at the bidding of his mistress. 

That her solitude was the sharpest and most terrible form of 
temptation he knew well, and he exposed her to it ruthlessly, will- 
ing she should fall, if to fall she chose. But whilst she was inno- 
cent, to assume and assert her guilty was what he would not do. 
Nay, there were even times when the fatal drug of Jeanne de 
Sonnaz’s presence was not on him, that he himself realized that 
he was a madman, who cast away the waters of life for a draught 
of poison, a jewel for a stone. 

But he thrust aside the thought as it arose. He had surren- 
dered himself to the will of his mistress. He had put his wife 
away forever. 

One day, when the snow was falling, a traveler reached the 
gates of Szarisla. 

He was wrapped in fur from head to foot; he wished to see the 
Princess Zouroff. 

“No one sees her,” answered the guardian of the gates; “it is 
the prince's order.” 

“ But I am a friend: will you not take my name to her?” 

“ I will not. No one enters: it is the prince’s order.” 

To the entreaties of the stranger, and to his gold, the custodian 
of the entrance- way, was obdurate. In his boyhood he had felt 
the knout, and he dreaded his master. 

The stranger went away. 

The next day was the Immaculate Conception. At Szarisla 
the Catholic religion was permitted by a special concession of a 
French princess Zouroff, and its functions still allowed by her 
descendants. 

There was no other church for the peasants than that which 
was part of the great building, once the monastery of Szarisla. 
They all flocked to it upon holy days. It was somber and ill lit, 
but gorgeous m Byzantine color and taste from the piety of 
dead Zouroff princes. 

The peasantry went over the snow through its doors; the 
stranger went with them; the mistress of Szarisla was at the 
midday mass as well as the household. 

In the stillness, after the elevation of the host, a voice arose 
and sang the Salutaris Hostia. 

A warmth like the glow of summer ran through all the veins 
of Vere; she trembled; her face was lifted for one moment, then 
she dropped it once more on her hands. 

The peasants and the household, awe-struck and amazed, listen- 
ed with rapt wonder to what they thought was the song of 


342 


MOTHS. 


angels; they could not see the singer. Stretched as in prayer, 
with her face hidden, the mistress of Szarisla, who was also 
the captive of Szarisla, never moved. 

The divine melody floated through the dimness and the still- 
ness of the lonely Polish church; the priest stood motionless 
and dumb; the people were mute; some of them wept in ecstasy. 
When it ceased, they prostrated themselves on the earth. They 
believed that the angels of God were among them. 

Yere rose slowly and stood pale and still, shrouded from 
head to foot in fur. 

She looked toward the shadows behind the altar. There she 
saw Correze, as she had known that she would see him. 

He came forward and bowed low. His eyes had a timidity 
and a fear in the wistfulness of their appeal to her. 

They stood before each other, and were silent. 

“Is this how you obey me?” her glance said to him without 
words. 

“Forgive me,” he murmured aloud. 

By this time the people had' risen, and were gazing at him, 
amazed to find him but a mortal man. 

Vere turned to the priest, and her voice trembled a little: 
“You are not angry, father? Will you not rather thank this — ■ 
traveler? he is known to me.” 

In Latin the priest spoke his admiration and his thanks, 
and in Latin the singer replied. 

Vere looked at him, and said, simply, “Come.” 

Correze obeyed her, and moved by her side. He dared not 
touch her hand, or speak any word that might offend her. He 
could see nothing of her face or form for the black furs that 
swept from her head to her feet. She passed into the sacristy 
with a passing word to the priest. She threw the heavy door 
close with her own hands, and let the furs fall off her in a 
heap upon the floor. 

Then for the first time she looked at him. 

“Why do you come? It is unworthy ” 

He moved as if a blow had been struck him ; his eyes long- 
ing and passionate, burned like stars; he too cast his furs 
down; he stood before her with a proud humiliation in his 
attitude and his look. 

“That is a harsh word,” he said, simply. “I have been in this 
district for weeks; I have seen you pass with your swift horses; 
I have been in your church before now; when you are im- 
prisoned here do you think I could live elsewhere, do you think 
I could sing in gay cities? For some months I knew nothing, 
I heard that you were on your Russian estates, and nothing 
more; when I was in Styria five weeks ago, I heard for the 
first time that you were in Poland. A man who knew your 
husband spoke of Szarisla as no place for a woman. Then I 
came. Are you offended? Was I wrong? You cannot be here 
of your own will. It is a prison. When I rang at the gates 
they told me it was the prince’s order that you should see no 
one. It is a captivity!” 

Vere was silent. 


MOTHS. 843 

** You should not have come,” she said, with an effort: “I am 
alone here: it was ungenerous.” 

The blood mounted to his face. 

“ Cannot you make excuse?” he murmured. “I know what 
Russians are; I know what their tyrannies are; I trembled for 
you, I knew no rest night or day till I saw the walls of Szarisla, 
and then you passed by me in the woods in the snow, and I saw 
you were living and well; then I breathed again, then all the 
frozen earth seemed full of spring and sunshine. Forgive me; 
how could I lead my life singing in cities, and laughing with the 
world, while I thought you were alone in this hotbed of disaffec- 
tion, of hatred, of assassination, where men are no better than 
the wolves? For the love of heaven, tell me why you are here! 
Is it your husband’s madness or his vengeance?” 

She was silent still. He looked at her, and stooped, and said 
very low, “ You learned the truth of Jeanne de Sonnaz. Was 
it that?” 

She gave a gesture of assent. The hot color came into her 
averted face. 

Correze stifled a curse in his throat. “It is a vengeance, 
then?” 

“ In a sense, perhaps,” she answered, with effort. “ I will not 
receive her. I will never see her again.” 

“ And your banishment is her work. But why imprison your- 
self? If you resisted, you would have all Europe with you.” 

“ I obey my husband,” said Yere, simply, “ and I am in peace 
here.” 

“ In peace ? In prison ! We spoke once of Siberia ; this is a 
second Siberia, and he consigns you to it in your innocence, to 
spare the guilty ! Oh, my God !” 

His emotion choked him as if a hand were at his throat ; he 
gazed at her, and could have fallen at her feet and kissed them. 

“ Noble people, and guiltless people, live in Siberia, and die 
there,” said Vere, with a faint smile. “ It is not worse for me 
than for them, and the spring will come some time, and the pea- 
santry are learning not to hate me ; it is a better life than that of 
Paris.” 4 

, “ But it is a captivity ! You cannot leave it if you would ; he 

does not give you the means to pass the frontier.” 

“ He would prevent my doing so, no doubt.” 

“ It is an infamy ! It is an infamy ! Why will you bear it? 
why will you not summon the help of the law against it?” 

“ If a man struck you, would you call in the aid of the law ? 

“ No. I should kill him.” 

“ When I am struck, I am mute: that is a woman’s courage. 
A man’s courage is vengeance, but ours cannot be.” 

Correze sighed, a heavy, passionate, restless sigh, as under a 
weighty burden. 

“A man may avenge you,” he muttered. 

“No man has any title.” she said, a little coldly. “I am 
the wife of Prince Zouroff.” 

A greater coldness than that of the ice-world without fell 
on the heart of her hearer. He did not speak for many 


844 


MOTHS. 


moments. The snow fell; the wind moaned; the gray dull 
atmosphere seemed between him and the woman he loved, 
like a barrier of ice. 

He said abruptly, almost in a whisper, “ The world says you 
should divorce him: you have the right ” 

“I have the right.” 

“Then you will use it?” 

“No — no,” she answered, after a pause. “I will not take 
any public action against my husband.” 

“He wishes you to divorce him?” 

“ No doubt. I shall be here until I do so.” 

“And that will be?” 

“ Never.” 

“ Never?” 

She shook her head. 

“ I think,” she said, in a very low tone, “ if you understand me 
at all, you understand that I would never do that. Those courts 
are ordy for shameless women.” 

He was silent. All that it was in his heart to urge he dared 
not even hint. A great anguish seemed to stifle speech in him. 
He could have striven against every other form of opposition, but 
he could not strive against this which sprang from her very 
nature, from the inmost beauty and holiness of the soul that he 
adored. 

The salt tears rose in his eyes. 

“You have indeed kept yourself unspotted from the world I” he 
said, wearily; and then there was silence. 

It lasted long; suddenly he broke it, and all the flood-gates of 
his eloquence were opened, and all the suffering and the worship 
that were in him broke up to light. 

“ Forgive me,” he said, passionately. “ Nay, perhaps you will 
never forgive; and yet speak I must. What will you do with 
your life? Will you shut it here in ice, like an imprisoned thing, 
for sake of a guilty and heedless man, a coarse and thankless 
master? Will you let your years go by like beautiful flowers 
whose bloom no eyes behold? Will you live in solitude and joy- 
lessness for the sake of a brute who finds his sport in shame? 
Your marriage was an error, a frightful sacrifice, a martyrdom; 
will you bear it always? will you never take your rights to liberty 
and light? will you never be young in your youth?” 

‘ ; I am his wife,” said Yere, simply; ‘ ‘ nothing can change that.” 
She shuddered a little as she added, “ God himself cannot undo 
what is done.” 

“And he leaves you for Jeanne de Sonnaz!” 

“I rule my life by my own measure, not by his. He forgets 
that he is my husband, but I do not forget that I am his wife.” 

“ But why remember it? He has ceased to deserve the remem- 
brance, he never deserved it; never in the first hour of your 
marriage to him.” 

Yere’s face flushed. 

“ If I forgot it, what should I be better than the wife of Paul 
de Sonnaz?” 

M You are cruel!” 


MOTHS. 


$45 

“ Cruel?” 

“ Cruel, to me.” 

He spoke so low that the wordy scarcely stirred the air, then he 
knelt down on the ground before her and kissed the hem of her 
gown. 

“ I dare not say to you what I would say, you are so far above 
all other women, but you know so well, you have known so long, 
that all my life is yours, to use or throw away as you choose. 
Long ago I sang to you, and you know so well, I think, all that 
the song said. I would serve you, I would worship you with the 
love that is religion, I would leave the stage and the world and 
art and fame, I would die to men, if I might live for you ” 

She shook as she heard him as a tall lily-stem shakes in a strong 
wind ; she signed wearily ; she was quite silent. Was she insult- 
ed, angered, alienated ? He could not tell. His ardent and elo- 
quent eyes, now dim and feverish, in vain sought hers. She 
looked away always at the gray, misty plain, the wide waste, 
treeless and sunless, swept with low, driving clouds. 

“You knew it always?” he muttered at length; “always, 
surely ?” 

“ Yes.” 

The single word came painfully and with hesitation from her 
lip3. She put her hand on her heart to still its beating. For the 
frret time in all her years she was afraid, and afraid of herself. 

“Yes,” she said, once more, “I knew it lately, but I thought 
you never would speak of it to me. You should have been silent 
always, always. If I were indeed a religion to you, you would 
have been so. Men do not speak so of what they honor. Am I 
no better than my husband’s mistresses in your eyes ?” 

She drew herself erect with a sudden anger, and drew the skirt 
of her gown from his hands. Then a shiver, as of cold, passed 
over her, a sob rose in her throat. She stood motionless, her face 
covered with her hands. 

He wished he had died a thousand deaths ere he had spoken. 
He rose to his feet and stood before her. 

“ Since the day by the sea that I gathered you the rose, I have 
loved you: where is the harm? All these years I have been silent. 
Had I seen you in peace and in honor, I would have been silent 
to my grave. I have been a sinner often, but I would never 
have sinned against you. I would never have dared to ask you 
to stoop and hear my sorrow, to soil your hand to soothe my 
pain. I saw you outraged, injured, forsaken, and your rivals the 
base creatures that I could buy as well as he if I chose, and yet I 
said nothing; I waited, hoping your life might pass calmly by 
me, ready, if of any defense or any use I could be. What was 
the harm or the insult in that? You are the golden cup, holy to 
me; he drinks from the cabaret glasses: can you ask me a man, 
and not old, and with life in my veins, and not ice, to be patient 
and mute when I see that, and find you in solitude here?” 

He spoke with the simplicity and the strength of intense but 
restrained emotion. All the passion in him was on fire, but he 
choked it into silence and stillness: he would not seem to insult 
her in her loneliness. 


845 


MOTHS 


Yere never looked at him. All the color had left her face, her 
hands were crossed upon her breast above the mark which her 
husband’s blow had left there: she stood silent. 

She remembered her husband’s words, “ All women are alike 
when tempted.” For the first time in her pure and proud life, 
temptation came to her, assailing her with insidious force. 

“ What do you ask?” she said, abruptly, at last. “Do you 
know what you ask? You ask me to be no better a thing than 
Jeanne de Sonnaz! Go! my life was empty before; now it is full 
— full of shame. It is you who have filled it. Go!” 

“ These are bitter words ” 

“ They are bitter; they are true. What is the use of sophism? 
You love me; yes; and what is it you would have me do? cheat 
the world with hidden intrigue, or brave it with guilty effrontery? 
one or the other; what else but one or the other could love be now 
for us?” 

Then, with a sudden recollection of the only plea that would 
have power to persuad or force to move him, she added — 

“ To serve me best go back to Paris; let Jeanne de Sonnaz hear 
you in all your glory there.” 

He understood. 

He stood silent, while the large tears stood beneath his droop- 
ing eyelids. 

“ I would sooner you bade me die.” 

“ It is so easy to die,” she said, with a passing weary smile. 
“ If — if you love me indeed — go.” 

“ At once?” 

She bent her head. 

He looked at her; he did not touch her; he did not speak to her; 
and he went, The door of the church closed with a heavy sound 
behind him. 

His footsteps were lost upon the snow. 

When the old priest entered the building, he found the mis- 
tress of Szarisla kneeling before the altar. 

She remained so long motionless that at length the old man 
was frightened and dared to touch her. 

She was insensible. 

Her household thought she had fainted from the cold. 


CHAPTER XXVII. 

Ten days later Correze sang in the midnight mass of Notre 
Dame. The face of the Duchesse de Sonnaz clouded, “ C’est une 
impasse ,” she muttered. 

The winter went on its course, and the spring-time came. 

Correze remained in Paris. 

He sang, as of old, and his triumphs were many, and envy 
and detraction could only creep after him daily and dumbly. 
For the summer he took a little chateau in the old-world village 
of Marly-le-Roi, and there gathered other artists about him. 
The world of women found him changed. He had grown cold 
and almost stern; amours he had none; to the seductions that 
had of old found him so easy a prey he was steeled. 


MOTHS. 


847 


In him, this indifference was no virtue. All women had be- 
come without charm to him. The dominion of a noble and un- 
divided love was upon him; that love was nothing but pain; but 
the pain was sacred to him. His lips would t never touch the 
golden cup, but the memory of it forbade him to drink of any 
earthly wines of pleasure or of vanity. 

His love, like all great love, was consecration. 

“ He will end in a monastery,” said the neglected Delilahs; and 
Sergius Zouroff heard them say it. 

A somber jealousy began to awaken in him as it had awakened 
at the sight of the necklace of the moth on the breast of Yere. 
What right had this singer to be faithful to the memory of his 
wife while he to his wife was faithless? 

“ Pur amant sur terre egare!” 

murmured Jeanne de Sonnaz again, with a little laugh, when she 
saw Correze passing out of the opera-house alone, and added in 
the ear of Zouroff, “How he shames you! Are you not 
ashamed?” 

Zouroff grew sullen and suspicious. He began to hate the sight 
of the face of Correze, and even that of the letters of his name 
on the walls of Paris. It seemed to him that ail the world was 
filled with this nightingale's voice. As the horses of Correze 
passed him on the boulevards, as Correze entered the Saint-Ar- 
naud or the Mirliton, when he was himself in either club, as the 
crowds gathered and waited in the streets, and he beard it was 
to see Correze pass by after some fresh success in his art, then 
Zouroff began to curse him bitterly. 

There was a look in the eyes of Correze when they glanced at 
his that seemed to him to say, with a superb scorn, “ I am faith- 
ful to your wife. And you?” 

This hatred slumbered like a dull and sullen fire in him, but it 
was a living fire, and the lips of Jeanne de Sonnaz fanned it and 
kept it alive. With ridicule, with hint, with conjecture, with 
irony, one way or another she stung him a hundred times a week 
with the name of Correze. 

“ She is in Poland, he is in Paris: what can you pretend there 
can be between them?” he said to her once, in savage impatience. 
Then she smiled. 

“ Distance is favorable to those lovers of the soul. Did I not 
quote you Sully-Prudhomme’s 

‘ Purs amants sur terre egares?’ ” 

Once in that spring-time Zouroff wrote one line to his wife: 

“ If you are tired of Szarisla, you know on w hat terms you can 
return to Paris.” 

He received no answer. 

He was perplexed. 

It seemed to him impossible that she could have courage, pa» 
tience, and strength to remain in that solitude. 

“ It is obstinacy/’ he said. “ It is stub born ess.” 

“ It is love,” said Jeanne de Sonnaz, with a little smile. 

Zouroff laughed also, but he chafed. 


848 


MOTHS. 


“ Love! for the wolves, or for the Poles?” 

“ It is love,” said his friend. “ It is the same love that makes 
Correze live like an anchorite in the midst of Paris, which 
makes your wife live like a saint at Szarisla. It is their idea of 
love; it is not mine or yours. It is dissipation of the soul. 
Have you never heard of it? 

‘ Aux ivresses meme irapunies 

Vous preferez tin deuil plus beau, 

Et vos levres meme au tombeau 
Attendent le droit d’etre unies.’ 

When our poet wrote that, he saw, or foresaw, the tragic and 
frigid loves of your wife and Correze. What can you do? It is 
of no use to swear. You cannot cite them aux tribunaux for a 
merely spiritual attraction, for a docile and mournful passion 
that is en deuil” 

Then she laughed, and made a little grimace at him. 

“ You cannot keep your wife in Poland all the same,” she said, 
seriously. “It becomes ridiculous. It is not she and Correze 
who are so; it is you.” 

He knew that she meant what she had meant at Arcachon. 

She was that day in his house : she had called there, she had little 
Claire with her, whom she had sent to play in the garden under 
the budding lilacs; she was about to fetch Due Paul from the 
Union, being a woman who was always careful to be seen often 
with her husband. Meanwhile, she was in her friend’s own suite 
of rooms in the Hotel Zouroff; she was going about them, to and 
fro, as she talked. 

“ I must write a note to leave for Nadine,” she said, as she 
went to hie bureau. “Why have you quarreled with Nadine? 
It is so stupid to quarrel. If one has an enemy, one should be 
more intimate with him, or her, than with any one else; and your 
sister is your friend, though she has an exaggerated adoration of 
Vera — sympathy through dissimilarity, the metaphysicians call 
it. del! what have you here? All women’s letters! I will bet 
you the worth of your whole entries for Chantilly that the only 
woman whose letters are absent from this coffer is your wife!” 

She had seen a large old casket of tortoise-shell and gilded 
bronze. The key was in the lock. The casket was full of notes 
and letters; she had pulled it toward her, turned the key, and 
was now tossing over its contents with much entertainment and 
equal recklessness. 

“It is too scandalous!” she cried, as she ran her eye 'wer one 
here and there. “ If there are not one-half of my acquaintances 
in this box! How imprudent of you to keep such things as 
these! I never wrote to you; I never write. None but mad 
women ever write to any man except their tailor. I shall take 
this box home ” 

Zouroff, who only slowly awoke to the perception of what she 
was doing, strode to the bureau with a cry of remonstrance. 
* Jeanne! what are you about?” he said, as he strove to get the 
casket from her. “ There is nothing that concerns you; they are 
old letters, those, very old: you must not do that.” 


MOTHS. 


341 ? 

“Must not? Who knows that word? not I,” said his friend. 
“ I shall take the box away. It will amuse me while they put on 
my hair. Novels are dull. I will send you this thing back to- 
morrow.” 

“You cannot be serious!” stammered Zouroff, as he tried to 
wrest the box from her. 

“I was never more serious,” said his visitor, coolly. “ Do not 
scream, do not swear. You know I do what I like. I want 
especially to see how my friends write to my friend. It is your 
own fault. I thought men always burnt letters. I wonder if 
Paul has a box like this. Adieu!” 

She went away, with the coffer in her carriage, to fetch her 
husband on the Boulevard des Capucines, and Zouroff dared not 
interfere with her; and the casket of letters went home to the 
Faubourg with her. 

In the morning she said to him, “They were really too com- 

E romising, those letters. You had no business to keep them. I 
ave burned them all, and Claire has got the coffer for her doll’s 
trousseau. I never thought much of my sex at any time; I think 
nothing now. And, really, they should no more be trusted with 
ink than children with firearms. Pooh ! why are you so furious? 
They were all old letters, from half a hundred different people; 
you have nothing to do with any of the writers of them now; 
and of course I am as secret as the grave, as discreet as a saint- 
pere.” 

With any other woman he would have let loose a torrent of 
abuse; with her he was sullen but apparently pacified. 

After all, they were old letters, and he could not very clearly 
remember whose letters had been shut away in that old tortoise- 
shell casket. 

“ I thought men always burnt these things,” said Jeanne de 
Sonnaz. “But, indeed, if women are foolish enough to write 
them, they deserve to be unfortunate enough to have them 
kept. I never wrote to any man, except to Paul himself — and 
Worth.” 

“ You are a model of virtue,” said her companion, grimly. 

“ I am something better,” said his friend. “ I am a woman of 
sense. Apropos, how long will this retreat in Poland last? It 
enot go on; it becomes absurd. The world is already talking, 
t he place of the Princess Zouroff is in the Hotel Zouroff.” 

4 ‘ It cannot be her place,” said Zouroff , savagely. ‘ ‘ She is— she 
is — obdurate still. I suppose she is content; the frost has broken, 
the weather is good even there.” 

Jeanne de Sonnaz looked him ki the eyes. 

“Weather is not all that a woman of twenty requires for her 
felicity. The whole affair is absurd; I shall not permit it to go 
on. I say again what I said last year at Arcachon. It may end 
in compromising me, and that I will not have. You must take 
your wife back to your house here, and live with her later at 
Felicite, or you must prove to society that you are justified in 
separating from her; one or the other. As it is, you are ridiculous, 
ac d I— I am suspected. Font cnfinir.” 

Zouroff turned away and walked gloomily to and fro tno 


850 


MOTHS. 


chamber. 44 I will not take her back,” he muttered. “ Besides 
— probably — she would not come.” 

He dared not say to his companion that he could not insist on 
his wife’s return without an open scandal, since she would for- 
ever refuse to receive or to visit the Duchesse de Sonnaz, once her 
guest and her friend. 

“ Besides, probably, she would not come?” echoed Jeanne de 
Sonnaz, with a shrill laugh that made his sullenness rage. “ My 
poor bear! is that all your growls and your teeth can do for you? 
You cannot master a woman of twenty, who has nothing in the 
world but what you ga^e her at your marriage. Frankly, it is 
too ridiculous. You must make a choice, if you would not be 
the laughing-stock of society; either you must have your wife 
here in Paris before all the world, and I will be the first to wel- 
come her, or you must Justify your separation from her; one of 
the two.” 

“ I shall do neither.” 

“ Then, mon ami , I shall b» very sorry indeed, because we have 
been friends so long, but unless you do one or the other, and that 
speedily, I shall be obliged with infinite regret to side with your 
sister and all the House of Herbert against you. I shall be 
obliged to close my doors to you. I cannot know a man who is 
cruel to an innocent wife. There ! you know I do what I say. I 
will give you a week, two weeks, to think of it. Afterward I 
shall take my course according to yours. I shall be very sorry 
not to see you any more, my dear Sergius; but I should be more 
sony if the world were to think I supported you in injustice and 
unkindness to Princess Zouroff. Please to go now; I have a 
million things to do, and a deputation about my creche is waiting 
for me down-stairs.” 

Sergius Zouroff went out of her house in a towering passion; 
yet it never occurred to him to separate from his tormentor. 
She had an empire over him that he had long ceased to resist, 
he could no more have lived without seeing Jeanne de Sonnaz 
than he could live without his draughts of brandy, his nights of 
gambling. As there is love Without dominion, so there is domin- 
ion without love. 

He knew very well that she never wasted words, that she 
never made an empty menace. He knew that her calculations 
were always cool and keen, and that when she thought her own 
interests menaced she was pitiless. She would keep her word ; 
that he knew well. What could he do? It was impossible to 
recall his wife, since he knew that his wife would never receive 
Jeanne de Sonnaz. The presence of his wife in Paris could only 
complicate and increase the difficulties that surrounded him: 
had he not banished her to Poland for that very cause? He 
cursed the inconsistencies and the insolences of women. 
The submission of his wife to his will and his command, had 
softened his heart toward her; he had vague impulses of com- 
passion and of pardon toward this woman who was so unyield- 
ing in her dignity, so obedient in her actions, so silent under her 
wrongs. As the year before, after he had found her the victim 
of her mother’s falsehood, some better impulse, some tender©?* 


MOTHS. 


m 


instinct than was common witn him had begun once more to 
move him toward that mute captive of his will at Szarisla. But 
Jeanne de Sonnaz Pad always been careful to smother those im- 
pulses at their birth under ridicule, and to arouse in their stead 
anger, impatience, and the morbidness of a vague jealousy. 
Without the influence of Jeanne de Sonnaz, Zouroff would have 
loved his wife; not nobly, because he was not noble, nor faithfully, 
because he could not be otherwise than inconstant, but still with 
more honesty of affection, more indulgence, and more purity, 
than he had ever had excited in him by any other creature. But 
perpetually, as that better impulse rose, she had been at hand to 
extinguish it by irony, by mockery, or by suggestion. He left 
her house, now, in bitter rage, which in justice should have 
fallen on her, but which by habit fell instead upon his absent 
wife. Why could not Vere have been like any other of the many 
high-born maidens of whom he could have made a Prmcesf 
Zouroff, and been indifferent, and malleable, and wisely blind, 
and willing to kiss Jeanne de Sonnaz on the cheek, as great ladies 
salute one another all over the world, no matter what feuds may 
divide or rivalries may sting them.'' Why must She be a woman 
unfitted for her century, made only for those old legendary and 
saintly days when the bread had changed to roses in Saint Eliza- 
beth’s hands? 

A devilish wish, that he was ashamed of even as it rose up in 
him, came over him, without his being able to drive it away. He 
wished he could find his wife guilty. He knew her as innocent 
as children unborn: yet he wished he could find her weak and 
tempted like the rest. 

His course would then be easy. 

Throughout the adulation of the world she had remained un- 
tempted, and she remained so still, in that solitude, that dullness, 
that captivity which would have driven any other to summon a 
lover to he-r side before a month of that joyless existence had 
flown. But then she had no lover. He was certain she had 
none. Not all the mockery and insistence of his mistress could 
make him seriously credit any infidelity, even of thought or sen- 
timent, in Vere. “And had she one, I would strangle him to- 
morrow,” he thought, with that vanity of possession which so 
sadly and cruelly survives the death of passion, the extinction of 
all love. Justify your separation from her, said his friend; but 
how? Sergius Zouroff was not yet low enough to accuse falsely 
a woman he believed from his soul to be innocent. He was per- 
plexed, and was bitterly angered against her, against himself, 
against all the world. He had meant to break her spirit and her 
will by her exile; he had never dreamed that sne would bear it in pa- 
tience and in silence; knowing women well, he had fully expected 
that the strength of her opposition would soon wear itself out, that 
she would soon see that to meet Jeanne de Sonnaz in society, and 
exchange the commonplaces of courtesy and custom was prefer- 
able to a life in the snows of the North, with no one to admire 
her loveliness, no pleasure to beguile her days and nights; he had 
thought that one single week of the winter weather with its 
lonely evenings in that deserted place would banish all power of 


352 


MOTHS. 


resistance in his wife. Instead of this, she remained there with- 
out a word even of regret or protest. 

He was enraged that he had ever sent her into exile. He 
would not retreat from a step he had once taken; he would not 
withdraw from a position he had thought it for his dignity to 
assume. But he felt that he had committed the worst of all 
errors in his own sight — an error that would end in making him 
absurd in the eyes of the world. He could not keep his wife for- 
ever at Szarisla; society would wonder, her family would mur- 
mur; even his Empress, perhaps, would require explanation; 
and what excuse could he give? He could not say to any of 
these, “I separate from her because she has justly thought her- 
self injured by Jeanne de Sonnaz.” 

As, lost in sullen meditation, he went down the Rue Scribe to 
go to his favorite club, he passed close by Correze. 

Correze w r as walking with a German margrave, who nodded 
to Zouroff with a little greeting, for they were friends; Correze 
looked him full in the face, and gave him no salutation. 

The insolence (as it seemed to him) filled up the measure of 
his wrath. 

“I will slit the throat of that nightingale,” he muttered, aa 
they passed. 

At that moment a friend stopped him in some agitation. 
“Good heavens, have you not heard? Paul de Sonnaz is dead; 
his horse has thrown him just before the door of the club. He 
fell with his head on the curb-stone ; his neck is broken.” 

Zouroff, without a word, went into the Jockey Club and into 
the chamber up-stairs, whither they had borne the senseless 
frame of the Due de Sonnaz, who had died in an instant, without 
pain. Zouroff looked down on him, and his own face grew pale 
and his eyes clouded. Paul de Sonnaz had been a good, simple, 
unaffected man, bon prince always, and unconscious of his 
wrongs; docile to his wife and blinded by her, cordial to his 
friends and trustful of them. 

“Poor simpleton! he was very useful to me,” muttered Zouroff, 
as he stood by the inanimate body of the man he had always 
deceived. It was of himself he thought, in the unchangeable 
egotism of a long life of self-indulgence. 

When Zouroff went to his own house that day he found the 
usual weekly report from his faithful servant Ivan. Ivan affirm- 
ed that all tilings went on as usual and nothing happened, but 
ventured to add: 

“ The climate does not seem to suit the princess. She rides a 
great deal, but she appears to lose strength, and the women say 
that she sleeps but little.” 

His sister came to him a little later in that day. 

“ It is of no use for us to quarrel, Sergius,” she said to him. “ I 
shall do Vera no good in that way. I am anxious, very anxious: 
she writes to me as of old, quite calmly, but Ivan writes, on the 
other hand, that she is ill and losing strength. Why do you not 
recall her? Paul de Sonnaz is dead; his wife must for some time 
be in retreat. Yera is your shield and safety now; without her 
Jeanne would marry you.” 


MOTHS. 


353 


Zouroff frowned. 

“My wife can always return if she please,” he said, evasively. 

Would she return? 

He could not see the Duchesse de Sonnaz, who was surround- 
ed by her family and that of her husband, in the first hours of a 
terrible shock to her nerves; and without her counsels, her per- 
mission, he dared do nothing. 

“ I will write to Vera,” he promised his sister; but she could 
not persuade him to write then and there. ‘ ‘ Szarisla is healthy 
enough,” he answered, impatient of her fears. “ Besides, a 
woman who can ride for many hours a day cannot be very 
weak.” 

He knew Szarisla was a place that was trying to the health by 
reason of its bitter cold springs and its scorching summers, with 
the noxious exhalations of its marshes. But he would not con- 
fess it. 

“She could return if she chose,” he added, to put an end to the 
remonstrances of the Princess Nelaguine. “As for her health, 
if you are disturbed about it, send any physician you like that 
you employ to see her; she has never been so strong as she was 
before the birth of that dead child in Russia.” 

“I shall not send a physician to her, as if she were mad,” an- 
swered his sister, with anger. 

“ Send Correze,” said Zouroff, with a sardoniqlittle laugh. 

“ Would you had died yourself, Sergius, instead of that poor 
imbecile whom you cheated every hour that he lived I” 

Zouroff shrugged his shoulders. “ I regret, Paul — pauvre gar- 
con!” he said, simply, and said the truth. 

“ Why do you not regret your o wn sins?” 

“ They are the only things that have ever amused me,” he re- 
plied, with equal truth. “And I thought you were an esprit 
fort , Nadine: I thought your new school of thinkers had all 
agreed that there is no such thing as sin any more — nothing but 
hereditary bias, for which no one is responsible. If we are not 
to quarrel again, pray make me no scenes.” 

“ We will not quarrel; it is childish. But you promise me to 
recall your wife?” 

“ I promise you— yes.” 

“When I shall have seen Jeanne,” he added, in his own 
thoughts. 

Nadine Nelaguine went to her own house angered, dissatisfied, 
and anxious. She was a clever woman, and she was penetrated 
with the caution of the world, as a petrified branch with the lime 
that hardens it. She smiled cheerfully always when she spoke 
of her sister-in-law, and said tranquilly in society that she had 
not Vera’s tastes, she could not dedicate herself to solitude and 
the Polish poor as Vera did. She kept her own counsel, and did 
not call in others to witness her pain or her dilemma. She knew 
that the sympathy of society is chiefly curiosity, and that when 
it has any title to pity it is quite sure to sneer. 

She held her peace and waited, but her often callous heart 
ached with a heavy regret and anxiety. 

“She has so much to endure!’' she thought, with hot tears in 


354 


MOTHS. 


her sharp keen eyes. “ So much, so much! — and it will pass her 
patience. She is young; she does not know that a woman must 
never resist. A woman should only — deceive. It is Jeanne’s 
work, all her work; she has separated them; I knew well that 
she would. Oh, the fool that he is! — the fool and the brute! If 
I, and Jeanne, and Lady Dorothy, and all the women that are 
like us, were eaten by dogs like Jezebel, the world would only be 
the better and the cleaner. But Vera, my lily, my pearl, my 
saint! ” 


CHAPTER XXVIII. 

In Poland the slow, cold spring was leaden-footed and gray 
of hue. 

In the desolate plains that stretched around Szarisla the country 
slowly grew green with the verdure of budding corn, and the 
yellow river outspread its banks, turbulent and swollen with the 
melted snows. 

She knew -what it was to be alive, yet not to live. If it had not 
been for the long gallops over the plains through the cold air 
which she forced herself to take for hours every day, she would 
scarcely have known she was even alive. Little by little, as time 
went on and the household found that she remained there, and 
that her husband never visited her, the impression gained on all 
the people that she had been sent there either as captive or as 
mad; and a certain fear crept into them, and a certain dislike to 
be alone with her, and timidity, when she spoke, came upon 
them. She saw that shrinking from her, and understood what 
their fancy about her was. It did not matter, she thought; only 
it hurt her when the little children began to grow afraid, too, 
and flee from her. 

“I suppose I am mad,” she thought, with a weary smile. 
•‘The world would say so, too: I ought to go back to it and kiss 
Jeanne de Sonnaz on both cheeks.” 

But to do so never occurred to her for one moment as any 
temptation. 

She was made to break, perhaps, but never to bend. 

One day, in the misty spring weather, which seemed to her 
more trying than all the ice and snow of winter, there came 
over the plains, now bright with springing grasses or growing 
grain, a roik, with hired horses, that was pulled up before the 
iron-bound doors of Szarisla. 

From it there descended a very lovely woman, with an imper- 
tinent, delicate profile, radiant, audacious eyes, and a look that 
had the challenge of the stag with the malice of the marmoset. 

When the servants on guard opposed her entrance with the 
habitual formula, “ The prince forbids it,” she thrust into their 
faces a card signed by Sergius Zouroff. 

On the card was written, “Admit to Szarisla the Duchess of 
Mull.” 

The servants bowed to the ground, and ushered the bearer of 
that irresistible order into the presence of their mistress without 
preparation or permission. 


MOTHS 


355 


Yere was sitting at a great oak table in one of the high em- 
brasured windows; the dog was at her feet; some Greek books 
were opened before her; the white woollen gown she wore fell 
from her throat to her feet, like the robe of a nun; she had no 
ornament except her thick golden hair coiled loosely about her 
head. 

Before she realized that she was not alone, her cousin’s wife 
stood before her, brilliant in color as an enamel of Petitot or a 
Saxe figure of Ivoendler; radiant with health, with contentment, 
with animation, with the satisfaction with all existent things 
which is the most durable though not the most delicate form of 
human happiness. Yere rose to her feet, cold, silent, annoyed, 
angered ; she was in her own house, at least her own since it was 
her husband’s; she could say nothing that was welcome. She 
was astonished, and stood mute, looking down from the height 
of her noble stature on this brilliantly-tinted, porcelain-like 
figure. For the only time in all her life she, who was Pick-me- 
up in the world of fashion, was made nervous and held mute. 

She was impudent, daring, clever, vain, and always successful ; 
yet for the moment she felt like a frightened child, like a chidden 
dog, before the amazed cold rebuke of those grand gray eyes that 
she had once envied to the girl Yere Herbert. 

“Well, you don’t seem to like the look of me,” she said at last, 
and there was a nervous quiver in her high, thin voice. “You 
can’t be said to look pleased no way ; and yet I’ve come all this 
way only just to see you : there aren’t many of the others would 
do as much.” 

“You have come to triumph over me!” thought her hearer; 
but, with the stately old-world courtesy that was habitual to her, 
she motioned to her cousin’s wife to be seated near her, and said, 
coldly : 

“You are very good. I regret that Szarisla can offer you little 
recompense for so long a journey. My cousin is well?” 

Frank’s first-rate, and the child too,” said Fuschia, Duchess of 
Mull, with a severe effort to recover the usual light-heartedness 
with which she faced all things and all subjects, human and di- 
vine. “ I called the boy after you, you know, but you never took 
any notice. Goodness ! if it’s not like a convent here ; it’s a sort 
of Bastile, isn’t it? and the windows are all barred up, and I 
thought they’d never let me in. If I hadn’t had your husband’s 
order they never would have done till the day of doom. It’s 
very hard on you.” 

“ My husband sent you here ?” said Yere, with her teeth closed. 

She felt powerless before a studied insult. 

“ Sent me ? My, no ! I don’t do things for people’s sending,” 
said the young duchess, with some asperity, and her natural 
courage reviving in her. “We were bound to come to Berlin 
because of Ronald Herbert’s marriage. He is marrying a Prus- 
sian princess. Didn’t you know of that ? Doesn’t your husband 
forward you on your letters ? And I said to myself, when I’m a a 
near as that I will go on to Poland and see her. So I got the order 
out of your husband. He didn’t like it, but he couldn’t say no 
very well, anyhow. We saw him as we came through Paris.” 


356 


MOTHS . 


“You were very good to take so much trouble,” said Vere, 
her eyes said otherwise. Her eyes said : “Why do you come to 
©ff end me in my solitude and insult me in my captivity ?” 

But in truth her visitor was innocent of any such thought. 
Human motives are not unmixed, and in the brilliant young 
duchess there had been an innocent vanity, a half-conscious con- 
ceit, in showing this high-born and high-bred woman, who had 
always disdained her, that she was above revenge and capable of 
a noble action. But beyond all vanity and conceit were the wish 
to make Vere care for it, the indignation at tyranny of a spirited 
temper, and the loyal impulse to stand by what she knew was 
stainless and aspersed. 

Fuschia Mull, having once recovered her power of speech, was 
not silenced soon again. She had seated herself opposite the high 
window; her bright eyes studied the face of Vere with a curiosity 
tempered by respect and heightened by wonder; she could flirt 
with princes and jest with sovereigns, and carry her head high 
in the great world with all the insolence of a born ccquette and 
a bom revolutionary, and since the day when she had become a 
duchess she had never ceased to assert herself in all the promi- 
nence and all the audacity that distinguished her; yet before this 
lonely woman she felt shy and afraid. 

“You aren’t a bit glad to see me,” she said, with a little tremor 
in her words, that flowed fast from the sheer habit of loquacity. 
“ You never would take to me. No; I know. You’ve never for- 
given me about that coal, nor for my marrying your cousin. Well, 
that’s natural enough. I don’t bear malice. There wasn’t any 
cause you should like me, though I think you’d like the baby if 
you saw him: he's a real, true Herbert, but that’s neither here 
nor there. I wanted to see you, because, you know, they say 
such things in Paris and London, and all the others are such 
poor dawdles; they’ll never do anything. Even Frank him- 
self says I shouldn’t interfere between husband and wife; but 
people always say you shouldn’t interfere when they only mean 
you may do yourself a mischief; and I never was one to be 
afraid ” 

She paused a moment, and her bright eyes roamed over the 
dark oak- paneled monastic chamber with its carpet of lambs’ 
skins, and beyond its casements the flat and dreary plains and 
the low woods of endless firs. 

“ My!” she said, with a little shiver; “ if it aren’t worse than 
a clearin’ out West! Well, he’s a brute, anyhow ” 

Vere looked at her with a regard that stopped her. 

“ It is my own choice,” she said, coldly. 

“ Yes, I know it is your own choice in a way,” returned the 
other, with vivacity; “ that is what I wanted to say to you. I 
told Frank the other day in Berlin, ‘ She never liked me, and 
there wasn’t any particular reason why she should; but I always 
did like her, and I don’t mean to stand still and see her put upon;’ 
you don’t mind my speaking so? — you are put upon, because you 
are just too good for this world, my dear. Don’t look at me so 
with your terrible eyes; I don’t mean any offense. You know 
they say all sorts of things in society, and some say one thing 


MOTHS . 


357 


and some another; but I believe as how the real fact is this, isn’t 
it? Your husband has sent you here because you would not re- 
ceive Madame de Sonnaz?” 

“ That is the fact — yes.” 

“Well, you are quite right. I only know if the duke— but 
never mind that. You know, or perhaps you don’t know, that 
in the world they say another thing than that; they sav Prince 
Zouroff is jealous of that beautiful creature, Correze 

“ I must request that you do not say that to me.'’ 

“ Well, they say it in your absence, some. I thought I’d bet- 
ter tell you. That Sonnaz woman is a bad lot: poisonous as 
snakes in a swamp she is, and of course she bruits it abroad. I 
cannot make out what your husband drives at; guess he wants 
you to divorce him; but it aren’t him so much as it’s that 
snake. Men are always what some woman or other makes 
them. Now, you know, this is what I came to say. I know 
vou don’t like me, but I am the wife of the head of your fathers 
house, and nothing can change that now, and in the world I’m 
some pumpkins— I mean they think a good deal of me. Now, 
what I come to ask you is this, and the duke says it with me 
with all his heart. We want you to come and live with us at 
Castle Herbert, or in London, or wherever we are. It will shut 
people’s mouths. It will nonsuit your husband, and you shall 
never see that hussy of the Faubourg in my house, that I 
promise you. Will you do it? Will you? Folks mind me, and 
when I say to them the Princess Zouroff stays with me because 
her husband outrages her, the world will know it’s a fact. That’s 

BO.” 

She ceased, and awaited the effect of her words anxiously and 
even nervously; she meant with all sincerity all she said. 

Into Vere’s colorless face a warmth came: she felt angered, yet 
she was touched to the quick. She could not endure the pity, the 
protection, yet the honesty and the hospitality and the frank 
kindness moved her to emotion. 

None of her own friends, none of those who had been her debtor 
for many an act of kindness or hour of pleasure, had ever thought 
to come to her in her exile; and the journey was one long and 
tedious, involving discomfort and self sacrifice, and yet had had 
no terrors for this woman, whose vulgarities she had always 
treated with disdain, whose existence she had always ignored, 
whose rank she had always refused to acknowledge. 

“You aren’t angry?” said the other, humbly. 

“Angry? Oh, no; you have been very good.” 

“Then you will come with us? Say! Your cousin will be as 
glad as I.” 

She was silent. 

“ Do come!” urged the other, with wistful eagerness. “We are 
going straight home. Come with us. Of course your mother 
ought to be the one, but then she’s — it’s no use thinking of her, 
and, besides, they wouldn’t believe her. They’ll believe me. I 
don’t lie. And you know I’m an honest woman. I mean to be 
honest all my days. I flirt, to be sure, but, Lord! what’s that: 
I’d never do what my boy would be sorry I had done when he 


358 


MOTHS. 


grows big enough to know. You needn’t be afraid of me. I 
aren’t like you. I never shall be. There is something in the old 
countries; but I’ll be true to you, true as steel. Americans aren’t 
mean!” 

She paused once more, half afraid, in all her omnipotent 
vanity, of the answer she might receive. 

Yere was still silent. The grand pride natural to her was at 
war with the justice and generosity that were no less her nature. 
She was humiliated, yet she was deeply moved. This woman, 
whom she had always despised, had given her back kindness for 
unkindness, honor for scorn. 

With a frank and gracious gesture she rose and put out her 
hand to her cousin’s wife. 

“ I thank you. I cannot accept your offer, but I thank you 
none the less. You revenge yourself very nobly; you rebuke me 
very generously. I see that in the past I did you wrong. I beg 
your pardon.” 

Into the radiant, bold eyes of Fuschia Mull a cloud of sudden 
tears floated. She burst out crying. 

When she went away from Szarisla in the twilight of the 
sultry day she had failed to persuade Yere, yet she had had a 
victory. 

“You area saint!” she said, passionately, as she stood on the 
threshold of Yere’s prison-house. “ You are a saint, and I shall 
tell all the world so. Will you give me some little thing of your 
own just to take home to my boy from you? I shall have a kind 
of fancy as it will bring him a blessing. It’s nonsense, maybe, 
but still ” 

Yere gave her a silver cross. 

The long, empty, colorless days went by in that terrible 
monotony which is a blank in all after-remembrance of it. Since 
the footsteps of Correze had passed away over the snow, a silence 
like death seemed to reign round her. She noticed little that was 
around her; she scarcely kept any count of the flight of time; it 
seemed to her that she bad died when she had sent him from her 
to the world— -the world that she would never revisit. For she 
knew her husband too well not to know that he would never 
change in the thing he demanded, and to purchase freedom by 
the humiliation of public tribunals was impossible to a woman 
reared in her childhood in the austere tenets of an uncompromis- 
ing honor, an unyielding pride. 

“ I can live and die here,” she mused often. “ But I will never 
meet his mistress as my friend, and I will never sue for a di- 
vorce.” 

When Sergius Zouroff from time to time wrote her brief words 
bidding her re- consider her choice, she did not consider for a 
moment; she tore up his message. 

The worst bitterness of life had passed her when she had bidden 
Correze depart from her. After that all seemed so easy, so 
trivial, so slight and poor. 

If her husband had sent her into poverty and made her work 
with her hands for her bread, it would have seemed no matter 
to her. 


MOTHS 


339 

As the summer came, parching, dusty, unhealthy, after the 
bitterness of the cold and the dampness of the rainy season, her 
attendants grew vaguely alarmed, she looked so thin, so tall, so 
shadowy, her eyes had such heavy darkness under them, and she 
slept so little. As for the world, it had already almost forgotten 
her; she was beautiful, but strange; she had always been strange, 
society said, and she chose to live in Poland, 

She thought of society now and then, of all that hurry and 
fever, all that fuss and fume of precedence, all that insatiable 
appetite for new things, all that frantic and futile effort at dis- 
traction, all that stew of calumny and envy, and conflict and 
detraction, which together make up the great world; and it all 
seemed to her as far away as the noise of a village-fair in the valley 
seems to the climber who stands on a mountain-height. Was it only 
one year ago that she had been in it? — it seemed to her as if centu- 
ries had passed over her head since the gates of Szarisla had 
closed behind her, and its plains and its pine woods had parted 
her from the World. 

Even still the isolation was precious to her. She accepted it 
with gratitude and humility. 

“ If I were seeing him daily in the life of Paris,” she thought, 
“ who can tell? — I might fall into concealment, deception, false- 
hood — I might be no stronger than other women — I might learn 
to despise myself.” 

And the gloom and the stillness, and the lonely, unlovely land- 
scapes, and the long, empty, joyless days, were all welcome to 
her: they saved her from herself. Her loveliness was unseen, 
her youth was wasting, her portion was solitude, but she did not 
complain. Since she had accepted this fate, she did not murmur 
at it. Her women wondered at her patience, as the exiled 
court of exiled sovereigns often wonder at their ruler’s forti- 
tude. 

One day at the close of the month of May, she sat by herself 
in the long, low room -which served her as her chief habitation. 
She had come in from her ride over the level lands, and was tired 
— she was very often tired now; a dull, slight rain was veiling the 
horizon, always dreary at its best; the sky was gray, the air was 
heavy with mist. 

It w T as summer-time, and all the plains were green with grass 
and grain, but it was summer as yet without color and without 
warmth, dreary and chilly; it was seven o’clock; the sun was 
setting behind a mass of vapor; she thought of Paris at that 
hour, at that season, with the homeward-rolling tide of carriages, 
with the noise the laughter, the gayety, with the light beginning 
to sparkle everywhere before the daylight had faded, with music 
on the air, and the scent of the lilacs, and the last glow of the 
sun shining on the ruined Tuileries. Had she ever been there 
with the crowds looking after her as her horses went down the 
Champs Elysees ? — it seemed impossible. It seemed so far away. 

By the papers that came to her she knew that Correze was still 
there; there in the city that loved him, where his glance was 
seduction, and his hours were filled -with victories; she knew that 
be was there, she read of the little chateau at Marly, she corn- 


SCO 


MOTHS. 


prehended why he chose to live so, in the full light of publicity, 
for her sake. She thought of him this evening, in that dull gray 
light which spread like a veil over the mournful plains of Poland. 
Would he not forget as the world forgot her? why not? She had 
no pride for him. 

At that moment, as the day declined, a servant brought her 
letters. 

Letters came to Szarisla but twice in the week, fetched by a 
horseman from the little town. The first letter she took out of 
the leather sack was from her husband. It was very brief. It 
said merely: 

“ Paul de Sonnaz died suddenly last week. If you will consent 
to pay a visit of ceremony and respect to his wife in her retire- 
ment at Ruilhieres, I shall welcome you to Paris with pleasure. 
If not, if you still choose to disobey me and insult me, you must 
remain at Szarisla, which I regret to hear from Ivan does not 
appear to suit your health.” 

There was nothing more, except his signature. 

The letter was the result of the promise he had given to his 
sister. Vere tore it in two. 

The next she opened was a long and tender one from Nadine 
Nelaguine, urging deference to his wishes, and advising concession 
on this point of a mere visit of condolence to Ruilhieres, with all 
the arguments that tact and affection and unscrupulousness 
could together supply to the writer. 

The next three or four were unimportant. The last was a 
packet addressed in a hand unknown to her. 

She opened it without attention. 

Out of the cover fell three letters in her mother’s handwriting. 

Wondering and aroused, she read them over. They were let- 
ters ten years old — letters of her mother to Zouroff ; letters for- 
gotten when others were burned the week before his marriage; 
forgotten, and left in the tortoise-shell casket. 

At ten o’clock on the following night, as Prince Zouroff sat at 
dinner in the Grand Circle a telegram was brought to him. It 
was from his wife: 

“ Never approach me: let me live and die here.” 


CHAPTER XXIX. 

Szarisla had hidden many sad and many tragic lives. 

It hid that of Vere. 

To her husband she perished as utterly as though she was dead. 
From remote districts of the North, news travels slowly— -never 
travels at all, unless it be expressly sent: Vere had so seldom 
written to any one that it scarcely seemed strange that she never 
wrote at all. The world had almost ceased to inquire for her; it 
thought she had withdrawn herself into retirement from religious 
caprice, or from morbid sentiment, or from an unreturned pas- 
sion, or that she had been sent into that exile for some fault: 
whenever women spoke of her they preferred to think this, they 
revived old rumors. For the rest, silence covered her life. 

Her sister-in-law wept honest tears, reviled her brother with 


MOTHS ' 


m \ 

honest rage, but then played musical intricacies, or gambled at 
bezique, and tried to forget that the one creature her cynical 
heart yearned over, and sighed for, was away in that drear cap- 
tivity in the Polish plains. 

If I went and lived with her,” thought Nadine Nelaguine, 
“ I should do her no good, I should not change her; she is taillee 
dans le marbre. I should alter her in nothing, and I should only 
be miserable myself.” 

In country houses of England and Scotland her mother went 
about through summer and autumn unchanged, charming, 
popular, and said, with a little smile and a sigh, “ Oh! my dear 
child — you know she is too good — really too good — wastes all her 
life in Poland to teach the children and convert the Nihilists; she 
is happiest so, she assures me. You know she was always so 
terribly serious; it was Bulmer that rained her!” 

And she believed what she said. 

Jeanne de Sonnaz mourned at Ruilhieres in the austere severity 
of a great lady’s widowhood in France, heard mass every day 
with her little blonde and brown-headed girls and boys about her 
in solemn retreat, yet kept her keen glance on the world, which 
she had quitted perforce for a space, and said to herself, annoyed 
and baffled, “ When will he cease to live at Marly?” 

For Correze was always there. 

Sergius Zouroff had been to Russia. He only went to Livadia, 
but the world thought he had been to his wife. He returned, 
and kept open house, at a superb chasse he had bought in the 
Ardennes. When people asked him for his wife, he answered 
them briefly that she was well; she preferred the North. 

Felicite was closed. 

The old peasant stood by her wall of furze and looked in vain 
along the field-paths under the apple-blossoms. 

“ Now the lark is dead,” she said to her son, “ neither of the 
two comes near.” 

So the months fled away. 

When the autumn was ended, Correze, who was always at his 
little chateau with other artists about him, said to himself, 
“ Have I not done enough for obedience and honor? I must see 
her, though she shall never see me.” 

Correze lived his life in the world obedient to her will, but 
men and women went by him like shadows, and even his art 
ceased to have power over him. 

He was a supreme artist still, since to the genius in him there 
was added the culture of years and the facility of long habit. 
But the joy of the artist was dead in him. 

All his heart, all his soul, all his passion, were with that lonely 
life in the gray plains of Poland, whose youth was passing in 
solitude and whose innocence was being slandered by the guilty. 

“I obey her,” he thought, “and what is the use? Our lives 
will go by like a dream, and we shall be divided even in our 
graves: the world will always think she has some sin— she lives 
apart from her husband!” 

He chafed bitterly at his doom; he grew feverish and nervous; 
he fancied in every smile there wa3 a mockery of her, in every 


m 


MOTHS. 


word a calumny. Once he took up a public print which spoke of 
himself and of his retreat at Marly, and which, with a hint and a 
veiled jest, quoted that line which Jeanne de Sonnaz had by a 
laugh wafted through Paris after his name: 

Pur amant sur terre egare!” 

Correze crushed the paper in his hand and threw it from him, 
and went out: he longed to do something, to act in some way; all 
the impetuosity and ardor of his temper were panting to break 
from this thraldom of silence and inaction. 

He would have struck Sergius Zouroff on the cheek in the sight 
af all Paris, but he had no title to defend her. 

He would only harm her more. 

She was the wife of Zouroff; and she accepted her exile at her 
husband’s hands; he had no title to resent for her what she would 
not resent for herself. 

“ I am not her lover,” bethought, bitterly; “I am nothing but 
I man who loves her hopelessly, uselessly, vainly.” 

It was late in autumn, and ghastly fancies seized him; vague 
terrors for her, that left him no sleep and no rest, began to visit 
him. Was she really at Szarisla? Was she indeed living? He 
could not tell. There were disturbances and bloodshed in the 
disaffected provinces; winter had begun there in Poland, the long, 
black silence of winter, which could cover so many nameless 
graves. He could bear absence, ignorance, apprehension, no 
longer; he went to sing twenty nights in Vienna and ten in 
Moscow. 

“ There I shall breathe the same air,” he thought. 

He went over the Alps, by way of the Jura and Dauphine; he 
thought, as he passed the peaceful valleys and the snow-covered 
summits that had been so familiar in childhood to him — 

“ If I could only dwell in the mountains with her, and let the 
world and fame go by!” 

Then he reproached himself for even such dishonor to her as 
lay in such a thought. 

“What am I, that she should be mine?” he mused. “I have 
been the lover of many women, I am not worthy to touch her 
hand. The world could not harm her: would I?” 

In Vienna he had brilliant successes. He thought the people 
mad. To himself he seemed forever useless and powerless for 
art; his voice sounded in his ears like a bell muffled and out of 
tune. The cities rejoiced over him and feasted and honored him; 
but it seemed to him all like a dream; he seemed only to hear the 
beating of his own heart, that he wished would break and be at 
peace forever. 

From Moscow he passed away, under public plea that he was 
bound for Germany, toward those obscure, dull, unvisited lands 
that lie toward the borders of East Prussia and the Baltic Sea, 
and have scarce a traveler to visit them, and never a poet or his- 
torian to save them from the nations’ oblivion, but lie in the 
teeth of the north wind, vast, ill populated, melancholy with the 
profound unchangeable wretchedness of a captive people. 


MOTHS . m 

Once more he saw the wide gray plains that stretched around 
Sririsla. 

For days and weeks he lingered on in the miserable village 
which alone afforded him a roof and bed; he passed there as a 
stranger from the South buying furs ; he waited and waited in 
the pine woods merely to see her face. “ If I can see her once 
drive by me, and she is well, I will go away,” he said to himself, 
and he watched and waited. But she never came. 

At length he spoke of her to the archimandrite of the village, 
as a traveler might of a great princess of whom hearsay had tola 
him. He learned that she was unwell and rarely left the house. 

Coneze, as he heard, felt his heart numb with fear, as all nat- 
ure was numbed with frost around him. 

He could not bring himself to leave. The village population 
began to speak with wonder and curiosity of him; he had bought 
all the furs they had to sell, and sent them through into Silesia ; 
they knew he was no trader, for he never bargained, and poured 
out his roubles like sand; they began to speak of him, and won- 
der at him, and he knew that it was needful he should go. But 
he could not ; he lived in wretchedness, with scarcely any of the 
necessaries, and none of the comforts, of life in the only place 
that sheltered travelers, but from that cabin he could see the 
stone walls of her prison-house across the white sea of the snow- 
covered plains ; it. was enough. The spot was dearer to him 
than the gay delirious pleasures of his own Paris. In the world, 
wherever he chose to go, he would have luxury, welcome, amuse-, 
ment, the rapture of crowds, the envy of men, the love of 
women, all the charm that success and art and fame can lend to 
life at its zenith. But he stayed on at Szarisla for the sake of 
seeing those pale stem walls that rose up from the sea of snow. 
Those walls inclosed her life. 

The snow had ceased to fall, the frost had set in, in its full in- 
tensity; one day the sun poured through the heavy vapors of the 
cloud-covered sky. 

He went nearer the building than he had ever done. He 
thought it possible the gleam of the sun might tempt her to the 
open air. 

He stood without the gates and looked: the front of the great 
somber pile seemed to frown; the casements had iron stanchions; 
the doors were like the doors of a prison. 

“And that brute has shut her here!” he thought — “ shut her 
here while he sups with Casse-une-Croute!” 

Suddenly he seemed to himself to be a coward, because he did 
not strike Sergius Zouroff and shame him before the world. 

“ I have no right,” he thought. “But does a man want one 
when a woman is wronged?” 

He stood in the shadow of some great Siberian pines, a century 
old, and looked “his heart out through his eyes.” 

As he stood there, one person and then another and then 
another came up and stood there, until they gathered in a little 
crowd. He asked, in their own tongue, of one of them why they 
came; they were all poor; the man, who was a cripple, said to 
£im, “ The princess used to come tc u- while she could; now sb*’ 


304 


MOTHS. 


is ill we come to her; she is strong enough sometimes to let us 
see her face, touch her hand; the sun is out; perhaps she will 
appear to-day; twice a week the charities are given.” 

Correze cast his furs close about him, so that his face was not 
seen, and stood in the shadow of the great gateway. 

The doors of the building opened ; for a moment he could see 
nothing; his eyes were blind with the intensity of his desire and 
his fear. 

When the mist passed from his sight he saw a tall and slender 
form, moving with the grace that he knew so well, but very 
wearily and very slowly, come out from the great doors, and 
through the gates; the throng of cripples and sufferers and poor 
of all sorts fell on their knees and blessed her. 

He kneeled with them, but he could not move his lips to any 
blessing: with all the might of his anguish he cursed Sergius 
^ouroff. 

Yere’s voice, much weakened, but grave and clear as of old, 
rame to his ear through the rarefied air: 

“ My people, do not kneel to me: you know it pains me. It is 
long since I saw you: what can I do?” 

She spoke feebly; she leaned on a tall cane she bore, and as she 
moved the thick, veil from about her head, the man who would 
have given his life for hers saw that she was changed and aged 
as if by the passing of many years. He stifled a cry that rose to 
his lips, and stood and gazed on her. 

The poor had long tales of woe; she listened patiently, and 
moved from one to another, saying a few words to each; behind 
her were her women, who gave alms to each as she directed 
them. She seemed to have little strength; after a time she stood 
still, leaning on her cane, and the people grouped about her, and 
kissed the furs she wore. 

Correze went forward timidly and with hesitation, and kneeled 
by her, and touched with his lips the hem of her clothes. 

“ What do you wish?” she said to him, seeing in him only a 
stranger, for his face was hidden; then as she looked at him a 
tremor ran through her; she started and quivered a little. 

“ Who are you?” she said, quickly and faintly, and before he 
could answer muttered to him, ‘ ‘ Is this how you keep your 
word? — you are cruel!” 

“For the love of God let me see you alone, let me speak one 
word,” he murmured, as he still kneeled on the frozen snow. 
“ You are suffering? you are ill?” 

She moved a little away, apart from the people, who only saw 
in him the traveler they knew, and thought he besought some 
succor from the mistress of Szarisla. He followed her. 

“ You promised ” she said, wearily, and then her voice 

sank. 

“ I promised,” he murmured, “ and I had not strength to keep 
it; I will go away now that I have seen you. But you are ill; 
this country kills you, your people say so; it is you who are 
cruel.” 

He could scarcely see her in the veils and the heavy fur-lined 
robes that screened her from the cold; he could only see the deli* 


MOTHS. 


365 


cate cheeks grown thin and wan, and the lustrous eyes that were 
30 weary and so large. 

** I am not ill; I am only weak,” she said, while her voice came 
with effort. “ Oh, why did you come? It was cruel!” 

She dropped her hood over her face; he heard her weeping: it 
was the first time he had ever seen her self-control broken. 

“ Why cruel?” he murmured. “ Dear God! how can I bear it? 
ifou suffer; you suffer in health as well as in mind. What do 
you do with your life? — is it to perish here, buried in the snow 
like a frozen dove’s? He is a brute beast; what need to obey him? 
what need to be faithful ?” 

“Ilush! hush! there has been sin enough to expiate. Let me 
live and die here. Go — go — go!” 

Correze was silent. He gazed at her and loved her as he had 
never loved her or any other, and yet knew well that she wa 3 
right. Nay, he thought almost better could he bear the endless 
night of perpetual separation than be the tempter to lead that 
fair and lofty life down into the devious way of hidden intrigue 
or out into the bald and garish glare of open adultery. 

“Oh, my love, my empress, my saint!” he murmured, as all 
his soul that yearned for her, gazed from his aching eyes. 
“ Long ago I said cursed be those who bring you the knowledge 
of evil. Others have brought it you; I will not bring more. I 
love you; yes; what of that? I have sung of love all my days, 
and I have sworn it to many, and I have been its slave often, too 
often; but my love for you is as unlike those passions as you are 
unlike the world. Yet you ask me to leave you here in the 
darkness of these ghastly winters, in the midst of an alien peo- 
ple that curse the name you bear, alone amidst every peril, sur- 
roundedg by traitors and spies? Ask me any thing; not that!” 

“ It must be that,” she said: her voice was below her breath, 
but it was firm. 

“No, no! not that, not that!” he cried, passionately; “any 
other thing; not that! Let me stay where 1 see the roof that 
shelters you. Let me stay where I breathe the same air as you 
breathe. Let me stay where, from a distance in the forests, I can 
watch your horses go by and see the golden gleam of your hair 
.on the mists. I will perish to the world, I will be dead to men, 

I will come and live here as a hunter or a wood-cutter, as a tiller 
of the fields, or what you will; but let me live where I know all 
that befalls you, where I can be beside you if you need me, where 
I can kiss the wind as it blows, because in its course it touched 
your cheek ” 

In all the strength of his passion, in all the melody of his voice, 
the eloquence that was as natural to him as song to a bird 
poured itself out in that prayer. Only to dwell near her — never 
to touch her hand, never to meet her eyes, but to be near her 
where she dwelt, in this land of frost, of silence, of darkness, of 
danger, of sorrow — that was all he asked. And all the tender- 
ness that was in her, all the youth, all the womanhood, all the 
need of sympathy and affection that were in her, longed to grant 
his prayer. 

To have him remain wiffin call, to feel that in that dark, lon«b 


366 


MOTHS. 


wintry desert his heart was beating and his courage was 
watching near her, to think that when the chill stars shone 
out of the midnight clouds they would shine on some lonely 
forest cabin where this one creature who loved her would be 
living in obscurity for her sake — this was so sweet a thought 
she dared not look at it, lest her force should fail her. She 
gathered all her strength. She remembered all that his life 
was to him — so gay, so great, so full of love, and honor, and 
triumph; would she be so weak, so wicked, in her selfishness, 
as to take him from the world for her, to be his living grave, 
to make him bankrupt in genius, in art, in fame? She thrust 
the temptation from her as though it were a coiling snake. 

“You mean the thing you say,” she murmured, faintly. 
“Yes, and I am grateful, but all that can never be. All you 
can do for me is — to leave me.” 

“How can I leave you — leave you to die alone? What need 
— what use is there in such a waste of life? No! what you bid 
me do, I do. I will keep the word I gave you; if you tell me 
to go, I go; but, for the pity of Heaven, think first what it is 
you ask; think a little of what I suffer.” 

“Have I not thought?” 

She put her hands out feebly toward him. 

“If you love me, indeed, leave me; there is sin enough, shame 
enough; spare me more. If indeed you love me, be my good 
angel — not my tempter!” 

He was pierced to the heart; he, the lover of so many women, 
knew well that moment in the lives of all women who love, 
and are loved, when they sink in a trance of ecstasy and pain, 
and yield without scarce knowing that they yield, and are as 
easily drawn downward to their doom as a boat into the whirl- 
pool. He saw that this moment had come to her, as it comes 
to every woman into whose life has entered love. He saw that 
he might be the master of her fate and her. 

For an instant the temptation seized him, like a flame that 
wrapped him in its fire from head to foot. But the appeal to 
his strength and to his pity called to him from out that mist 
and heat of passion and desire. All that was generous, that was 
chivalrous, that was heroic, in him, answered to the cry. All 
at once it seemed to him base — base, with the lowest sort of 
cowardice — to try and drag the pure and lofty spirit to earth, 
to try and make her one with the women she abhored. He topk 
her hands, and pressed them close against his aching heart. 

“Better angels than I should be with you,” he murmured; 
“but at least I will try and save you from devils. No man’s 
love is fit for you. I will go, and I will never return. 

He stooped/ and with tremulous lips touched her hands; 
(then once more he left her, and went away over the frozen 
snow. 


CHAPTER XXX. 

Without pause Correze traveled straight to Paris. 

He reached there late, and had barely time to dress and 
pass on to the stage. 


MOTHS. 


80* 


It was the opera of “ Romeo e Giulietta.” 

lie knew its music as a child knows its cradle- song. 

He played, acted, and sang, from one end to the other of the 
long acts, perfectly, but without any consciousness of what he did, 

“ I am the mechanical nightingale,” he thought, bitterly: the 
crowded opera-house swam before his eyes. 

“Are you ill, Correze?” murmured the great songstress who 
was his Juliet. 

“I am cold,” he answered her. It seemed to him as if the, 
cold of those bitter plains, which were the prison of Vere, and 
might be her tomb, had entered his blood and frozen his very 
heart. 

When he went to his carriage the streets were lined with tha 
throngs of a city that loved him. They pressed to see him, they 
shouted his name, they flung bouquets of flowers on to him; be 
was their Eoi Soleil, their prince of song. H° wondered was he 
mad, or were they? His voice felt strangled in his throat; he 
saw nothing of the lighted streets and the joyous multitudes, he 
saw only the piteous eyes of the woman he loved as she had said 
to him: 

“ Be my angel — not my tempter!” 

“ I cannot be her angel,” he said to himself. “But I will try 
and save her from devils.” 

In all his life before he had never been at a loss. He had never 
known before what doubt meant, or 

“ What hell it is in waiting to abide.” 

His victories had all been facile, his loves had all been swift and 
smooth, his career had been a via triumphalis without shadow, he 
had been happy always, he had had romance in his life, but no 
grief, no loss, no regret, he had been the spoiled child 01 fate and 
of the world. 

Now the fatal tenderness, that unavailing regret, which had 
been no darker than a summer cloud when he had passed away 
from the shores of Calvados, leaving the child Vere Herbert in 
her mother’s hands, had spread over all his present and hung over 
all the horizon of his future, in a sunless gloom that nothing 
would ever break or lighten. 

And he was powerless! 

If he could have acted in any way he would have been con- 
soled. The elasticity and valor of his temperament would have 
leaped up to action like a bright sword from the scabbard. But 
he could do nothing. The woman he adored might perish slowly 
of those nameless maladies which kill the body through the 
mind; and he could do nothing. 

He would not tempt her, and he could not avenge her. 

He who knew the world so intimately, who had seen a 
million times a laugh, a hint, a word, destroy the honor of a 
name, kuew well that he would but harm her more by any 
defense of her innocence, any protest against the tyranny of her 
husband. 

§|Though he gave his life to defend her fair fame, the world 
would only laugh. 


888 


MOTHS . 


He drove through the brilliant streets of Paris at midnight 
and shut his eyes to the familiar scenes with a heart-sick weari- 
ness of pain. He loved cette bon ville de Paris , which had 
smiled on him, played with him pampered him, as a mother 
her favorite child; which always lamented his departure 
when he left it, which always welcomed him with acclamation 
when he returned. He loved it with affection, with habit, with 
the strength of a thousand memories of his glory of his pleas** 
ure, of his youth ; vet, as he drove through it, almost he cursed 
it ; it sheltered the* vices of Sergius Zouroff and worshiped hid 
wealth. 

He entered the club of the Grand Circle after the opera. He 
wished to gather tidings of Zouroff and of what the world said 
of his wife in her exile. 

In one of the rooms Zouroff was seated; his hat was on the table 
beside him; he was speaking with the Marquis de Merilhac. Aa 
Correze entered, Zouroff rose and put his hat on his head. “Let 
us go to a club where there are no comedians,” he said, in a 
loud voice to the Marquis de Merilhas, and went out. It was an 
insolence with intention; in the Ganashes men keep their heads 
uncovered. 

All who were present looked at Correze. He took no notice. 
He spoke to his old acquaintances; the insult had no power to 
move him, since he had so long kept his arm motionless and his 
lips mute for her sake. 

Some men who knew him well and were curious, made a vague 
apology for the Russian prince. 

“ He is jealous,” they added, with alittle fatuous laugh. ‘ ‘ You 
come from Poland!” 

“ I have sung in Moscow and Warsaw,” said Correze, with an 
accent that warned them not to pursue the theme. ‘ ‘ And it is 
true,” he added, with a grave coldness that had its weight from 
one so careless, so gay, and so facile of temper as he was — “it is 
true that in a part of Poland the Princess Yera Zouroff does live 
on one of her husband’s estates, devoting herself to the poor, be- 
cause she prefers solitude and exile to receiving as h©r friend the 
widow of Paul de Sonnaz, the sister of Herve de Merilhac.” 

For the moment, such is the immediate force of truth, no one 
laughed. There was the silence of respect. 

Then they spoke of his return, of the opera that night, of his 
stay in Vienna, of all the topics of the hour then occupying the 
scarcely-opened salons of Paris. No man in the Ganaches was 
bold enough to speak again, in his presence, of the Princess 
Zouroff. 

“ Why did you insult Correze?” said the Marquis de Merilhac, 
as Zouroff passed on with him to the Rue Scribe. 

“I do not choose to be in the same club with a singer,” answered 
Zouroff, with rough impatience. 

“ But he belongs to half the great clubs of Europe.” 

“Then I will insult him in half of them, you may have 
heard, il fait la cour a ma femme,” 


MOTHS. 


369 


“ Jeanne told me something at Felicite,” said Herve de Meril- 
hac. “ But she said it was only romance.” 

“Romance! Faust or Edgardo! or, as in a Renaissance dress, 
he is adored by Leonora! Merci bien! I am not jealous, I am 
not unreasonable; I know the destinies of husbands. But I do 
not accept a rival in the satin and tinsel of the stage! Half a 
century ago,” added Zouroff, as he turned in at the doors of the 
Jockey Club, “one could have had this man beaten by one’s 
lackeys. Now one is obliged to meet him at one’s cercle and in- 
sult him as though he were a noble.” 

“ He is one,” said the Marquis de Merilhac, who was perplexed 
and dissatisfied. 

“ Faugh!” said Zouroff, with the scorn of a great prince. 

The next morning, as Correze passed through the gardens of 
the Tuileries, he chanced to see the small, spare form of the 
Princesse Nelaguine; she was seated on a bench in the sunshine 
of the wintry morning, watching the little children of her eldest 
son float their boats upon one of the basins. He paused, hesi- 
tated, saluted her, and approached. Madame Nelaguine smiled 
on him. 

‘‘Why not?” she thought; “there is nothing true; even were 
it true she would be justified.” 

Correze spoke to her with the compliment of daily life, which 
he better than most men could divest of the common-place and 
invest with grace and dignity. Then abruptly he said to her, 
“ Princess, I was coming to you this morning; I have been to 
Szarisla ” 

She started, and looked at him in surprise. 

“To Szarisla? You have seen — my brother’s wife? It is 
strange you should tell me.” 

“ I tell you because she is your brother’s wife,” answered Cor- 
reze; his face was pale and grave, and his tone was sad and cold, 
with an accent of rebuke, which her quick ear detected. “ May 
I speak to you honestly? I should be your debtor if you would 
allow me.” 

She hesitated, then sent the Children and their attendants fur- 
ther away, and motioned to him to sit beside her. 

“ I suppose you know what they say,” she said to him. “ My 
brother would think I did ill to listen to you.” 

“In what they say, they lie.” 

“ The world always lies, or almost always; I think it lies about 
you, or I should not speak to you. You have been to Szarisla?” 

“ I have been there; I have seen her for five minutes, no more, 
though I lived in the village five weeks. Madame, she has death 
in her face.” 

The tears rushed into his hearer’s keen, curious eyes; her lips 
trembled. 

“ No, no! you exaggerate! Yera dying? you make my heart 
sick. I have feared for her health always — always. What did 
you do those five long weeks?” 

“ I waited to see her face,” said Correze, simply. “ Madame, 
listen to me one moment: I will try not to tire your patience 
She is your brother’s wife — yes; but she is dealt with as he would 


MOTHS. 


Z> {0 

never deal with one of his mistresses. Listen. Long ago, when 
she was a child, I met her on a summer morning; I, loved her 
then — call it fancy, caprice, poetry, what you will. Her mother 
gave her, not to me, but to Prince Zcuroff. I kept away from 
her; I would not sing in Russia whilst she was there; I would not 
approach her in Paris. If I had seen her ki peace, seen her even 
respected, I would have tried to be content, I would forever have 
been silent: instead, I have seen her insulted in every way that 
infidelity can insult a woman ” 

“ I know! I know! Spare me -that; go on ” 

“ At last I knew that she was sent into exile; and why? because 
she would no longer receive Jeanne de Sonnaz.” 

“ It was a madness to refuse to receive Jeanne de Sonnaz. 
After all, what did it matter? Women meet their rivals, their 
foes, every hour, and kiss them. It was madness to refuse.” 

“ It may have been. It was noble, it was truthful, it was brave, 
it was befitting the delicacy and the dignity of her nature, For 
that act, though no one can deny that she is in the right, she is 
exiled into a land where life is unendurable, even to yourselves, 
natives of it; where the year is divided between an endless winter 
and a short, parching season of heat that it is mockery to call 
the summer; where the only living creatures that surround her 
are servants who watch and chronicle her simplest action, and 
peasants whose God is a dream and whose homes are hovels. Did 
your brother wish for her death, or for her insanity, that he chose 
Szarisla?” 

“ My brother wishes that she should meet Jeanne de Sonnaz. 

I am frank with you; be frank with me. Are you the lover of 
my brother’s wife? Paris says so.” 

“ Madame, that I love her and shall love no other whilst I live 
I do not deny. That I am her lover is a lie, a calumny, a 
blasphemy, against her.” 

Madame Nelaguine was silent: she looked at him with search- 
ing, piercing eyes. 

“What did you do, then, at Szarisla?” 

“ I went to see her face, to hear her footsteps, to be sure that 
she lived. I spoke to her; I laid my soul, my honor, all the 
service of my life, at her feet, and she rejected them. That is 
all.” 

“ AH?” 

She was once more silent; she was a suspicious woman and a 
cynical, and often false herself, and never credulous; yet she 
believed him. 

“ You have been unwise, imprudent; you should never have 
gone there,” she said, suddenly. “ And she is ill, you say?” 

“The priest said so; she looks so; she is weak; she is all alone. 

I should never have gone there? I should have been a coward 
indeed if I had not; if I had known her so deeply wronged, and 
had not at least offered her vengeance ” 

“ Her husband is my brother!” 

“ It is because he is your brother that I ask the grace of your 
patience to-day. Madame, remember it is very terrible that at 
twenty years old an innocent creature, lovely as the morning, 


MOTHS . 


m 

should be confined in exile till she dies of utter weariness, of 
utter loneliness, of utter hopelessness ! Prince Zouroff is within 
his rights, but none thS less is he an assassin. I believe he al- 
leges that she is free to return ; but when he couples her return 
with an unworthy condition that she cannot accept, she is as 
much his captive as though chains were on her. If she remain 
there, she will not live ; and she will never consent to leave Szar* 
isla, since she can only leave it at the price of affected friend* 
ship with the Duchesse de Sonnaz ” 

“ What would you have me do?” cried his hearer, in a sudden/ 
agitation very rare with her, in which anger and sorrow strove\ 
together; “what is it you ask? what is it you wish? Ido not 
understan d ” 

“ I wish to speak to Prince Zouroff.” 

“ Speak to Sergius?” 

“ In my name, yes ; he would not hear me, or I would speak 
myself. Madame, your brother knows very well that his wife is 
as innocent as the angels, but it suits him that all the world 
should suspect her.” 

“ Then he is a villain !” 

“ He is under the influence of an unscrupulous woman; that 
is nearly the same thing. Madame de Sonnaz never forgave his 
marriage; she now avenges it. Madame, what I wish is that you 
should speak to your brother as I speak to you. He would not 
hear me; that is natural. He is her husband, I am nothing; he 
has the right to refuse to listen to her name from my mouth. 
But you he will hear. Tell him what I have told you; tell him 
that when the world speaks of me and of her it lies; and tell 
him — I can think of no better way — that to remove all possibil- 
ity of suspicion, to put away all semblance of truth from the 
rumors of society, I myself will die to the world. Why not? I 
am tired. She will never be mine. Fame is nothing to me. 
The very music I have adored all my life seems like the mere 
shaking of dried peas in an empty bladder. I cannot forget one 
woman's face, a woman who will never be mine. I will leave 
art and the world of men; I will go back to the mountains where 
I was born, and live the life my fathers led: in a season Europe 
will have forgotten that it had ever an idol called Correze. Nay, 
if that fail to content him, if he doubt that I shall keep my 
word, I will do more; I will enter one of those retreats where 
men are alone with their memories and with God. There is the 
Chartreuse that has sheltered greater men than I, and nobler 
lives than mine. It is all alone amidst the hills; I should be in 
my native air; I could go there. You stare; do you doubt? I 
give my word that I will die to the world; I can think of no 
other way to save her name from mine. If that content him, I 
will do it, if he will bring her back into the honor of the world 
and never force her to see Jeanne de Sonnaz. Does it seem so 
much for you to do? It is nothing; I would die in my body for 
her, or to do her any good. Thus I shall die, only in name.” 

He ceased to speak, and his hearer was silent. There was no 
sound but the wind blowing through the scorched ruins of the 


372 MOTHS. 

Tuileries and scattering on the earth the withered leaves of the 
trees. 

“But what you will do is a martyrdom,” she cried, abruptly, 
“ it is death ten thousand times over! Retreat from the world? 
you? the world’s idol!” 

“ I would do more for her if I knew what to do.” 

She held out her hand to him. 

“You are very noble.” 

I “I will do what I say,” he answered simply. 

She was silent, in the silence of a great amaze— the amaze- 
ment of a selfish and a corrupt nature at one that is unselfish and 
uncorrupted. 

“ You are very noble,” she murmured once more, “and she is 
worthy of your heroism. Alas! it will be of no use: you do not 
understand my brother’s character, nor what is now moving his 
mind. You do not see that his desire is, not to save his wife 
from you, but to force her to divorce him.” 

“ If he were not your brother—” 

“ You would curse him as a scoundrel? He is not that, he is a 
man, too rich, spoiled by the world, and now dominated by a 
-dangerous woman. I will speak to him; I will tell him what 
you have said; but I have little hope.” 

She gave him her hand again, her eyes were wet. He rose, 
bowed and left her. He had done what he could. 

At that moment Sergius Zouroff, in the smoking-room of the 
Ganaches, was reading a little letter that had come to him from 
the chateau of Ruilhieres. It was very short; it said only, “ Cor- 
reze has returned to Paris: he has been at Szarisla. Do not let 
his talent, the trained talent of the stage, deceive you.” 

Madame Nelaguine an hour later told him of what had been 
said to her in the gardens of the Tuileries. She spoke with an 
eloquence she could command at will, with an emotion that was 
rarely visible in her. 

“This man is noble,” she said, when she had exhausted all 
argument and all entreaty, and had won no syllable from him 
in reply. “Have you no nobility to answer his? His sacrifice 
would be unparalleled, his devotion superb; he will die to the 
world in the height of his fame, like a king that abdicates in his 
full glory and youth. Can you not rise for once to his height ? 
Will a prince of our blood be surpassed in generosity by an 
artist ?” 

He heard his sister speak in unbroken silence. She was afraid 
with a great fear. His stormy passions usually spent themselves, 
often in rage that was too indolent to act, but his silence was 
always as terrible as the silence of the frost at midnight in his 
own plains, when men were dying in the snow. 

“You may be the dupe of a comedian’s coup de theatre ,” was 
all that he said when she had ended; “ I am not. Tell him so.” 

Sergius Zouroff knew well, when he looked into his own heart, 
that he was doing a base thing; he knew well that Yere was as 
pure of any earthly sin as any earthly creature can be; he did 
not believe any one of the daughters of men had ever been so in- 
nocent as she, os: so faithful to the things she deemed her duty. 


MOTHS, 


373 


But lie stifled liis conscience, and let loose only the rage which 
consumed him — half rage against her because she was forever 
lost to him, half rage against himself for this other tyranny 
which he had allowed to eat into and absorb his life. He was 
sullen, angered, dissatisfied; a dull remorse was awake in him, 
and the savage temper which had been always uncontrolled in 
him craved for some victim on which to vent itself. His wife he 
| dared not approach. His fury, though never his suspicions, fell 
upon Correze. 

i “ He is not her lover; she is pure as the ice,” he said impa- 
tiently to himself. But she was not there, and Correze was be- 
fore his eyes in Paris. A real and somber hatred grew up in 
him; for little, for nothing, he would have killed this man as he 
i killed a bird. 

Correze sang this night at the Grand Opera, according to his 
engagement. 

The house was in a tumult of rapture and homage; flowers 
rained on him; women wept; Paris the cynical, Paris the mocker, 
Paris the inconstant, was faithful to him, worshiped him, loved 
him as poets love, and dogs. It was the grandest night that 
even his triumphal life had ever known. It was the last. When 
the glitterings crowds swam before his eyes, and welcomed his 
return, in his heart he said to them, “ Farewell.” 

As men doomed to death at dawn look at the sunrise of the last 
day they will ever see, so he looked at the multitude that hung 
upon his voice. It was for the last time, he said to himself: to- 
morrow he would keep the word he had given to Sergiu3 Zouroff 
and would perish to the world. He would sing no more, save in 
the matin song, in the cold, white dawns, in the monastery of the 
mountains above Grenoble. 

“ She said rightly,” he thought, “ it is so easy to die.” 

But to live so would be hard. 

He would leave the laugh of the world behind him; a few 
women would mourn their lost lover, and the nations would 
mourn their lost music, but the memory of nations is short-lived 
for the absent, and he knew well that for the most part the world 
would laugh — laugh at Ruy Bias, at Romeo, who chose to bury 
his life for a fatal passion in the solitudes of the mountains in 
days when passion has lost all dignity and solitude all consolation. 
To the world he would seem but a romantic fool, since in this 
time there is neither faith nor force, but only a dreary and 
monotonous triviality that has no fire for hatred and has no soul 
for sacrifice. 

“I can think of nothing else,” he said to himself. 

He could think of no other way by which he could efface him- 
self from the living world without leaving remorse or calumny 
upon her name. To him it was not so terrible as it would have 
been to others. He had had all the uttermost sweetness and per- 
fection of life ; he had drunk deeply of all its intoxications. He 
was now at the zenith of his triumphs. He thought it would be 
better to lay aside the cup still full rather than drain it to the 
lees. He thought that it would not be so very bitter after all to 
abdicate ; not half so bitter as to await the waning of triumphs 


MOTHS . 


£74 

the decay of strength, the gradual change from public idolatry 
to public apathy, which all genius sees that does not perish in its 
prime. And he had more of the old faiths in him than most men 
of his generation. He had something of the enthusiast and of the 
visionary, of Montalembert and of Pascal. It would not be so 
hard, he thought, to dwell amidst the silence of the mountains, 
waiting until the Unknown God shoifid reveal by death the mys- 
teries of life. Beyond all and beneath all, as he had often said, 
he was a mountaineer. lie would be a monk amidst the moun- 
tains. Let the world la'ugh. 

As the crowd of the opera-house recalled him, and the plaudits 
that he would never hear again thundered around him, he mut- 
tered: 

“ Je briserai sur mon genou 
Le sceptre avec la diademe 
Comme un enfant casse un joujou 
Moi-meme, en plein regne, au grand jour.” 

And his eyes were wet as he looked for the last time on the 
people of Paris and said in his heart, “Farewell.” 

As he went away from the theater, amidst the shouts of the 
exulting multitude — waiting as when kings pass through cities 
that hail them as victors — a note was brought to him. It was 
from Nadine Nelaguine. It said merely, “ I have spoken to my 
brother, but it is of no use. He will hear no reason. Leave 
Paris." 

The face of Correze grew dark. 

“ I will not leave Paris,” he said to himself. He saw in the 
council a warning or a threat. “I will not leave Paris until I 
enter the shroud of the monkish habit.” 

He smiled a little wearily, thinking that when he should have 
buried himself in the Chartreuse the world would only see in 
the action a coup de theatre — a fit ending to the liistrion who 
had been so often the Fernando of its lyric triumphs. 

He went down the street slowly on foot, the note of Nadine 
Nelaguine in his hand, his carriage following him, filled with the 
bouquets and wreaths that had covered the stage that night. 

He looked up at the stars and thought, “When I am amidst 
the snows alone in my cell, will these nights seem to me like 
heaven or hell?” 

An old and intimate friend touched his arm and gave him a 
journal of the evening. 

“ Have you read this?” said his friend, and pointed to an article 
signed, “ Un qui n'y croit pas” 

It was one of the wittiest papers that was sold upon the Boule- 
vards; there was in it a brilliant, social study: it was called, 
<i Les anges terrestres.” 

Under thin disguises it made its sport and jest of the Ice- 
Flower away in Poland, and the Romeo of Paris, who was break- 
ing the hearts of women by an anchorite’s coldness. 

It had been written by a ready writer in the Rue Meyerbeer, 
but its bitting irony, its merciless raillery, its gay incredulity, 
its sparkling venom, had been inspired from the retreat of Ruil- 
Meres. 


MOTHS. 


373 


Correze turned into Bignon’s, which he was passing, and read 
it sitting in the light of the great salon. 

It would have hurt him less to have had a score of swords 
buried in his breast. 

“If I avenge her I shall but darken her name more!” he 
thought, in that agony of impotence which is the bitterest suffer- 
ing a bold and a fervent temper can ever know. 

At that moment Sergius Zouroff entered: he had both men 
and women with him. Among the women were a circus rider 
of the Hippodrome and the quadroon Casse-une-Croute. 

It was midnight. 

Correze rose to his feet at a bound, and approached the hus- 
band of Vere. 

With a movement of his hand he showed him the article he 
had read. 

“Prince Zouroff,” he said, between his teeth, “will you chas- 
tise this as it merits, or do you leave it to me?” 

Zouroff looked at him with a cold stare. He had already seen 
the paper. For the moment he was silent. 

“Isay,” repeated Correze, still between his teeth, “ do you 
avenge the honor of the Princess Zouroff? I ask you in public, 
that your answer may be public.” 

“The honor of the Princess Zouroff!” echoed her husband, 
with a loud laugh. “ Mais — c’est a Vous , monsieur!” 

Correze lifted his hand and struck him on the cheek. 

“ You are a liar, you are a coward, and you are an adulterer!” 
he said, in his clear, far-reaching voice, that rang like a bell 
through the silence of the assembled people; and he struck him 
three times as he spoke. 


CHAPTER XXXI. 

To Szarisla, in the intense starlit cold of a winter’s night, a 
horseman, in hot haste, brought a message that had been borne 
to the nearest city on the electric wires and sent on by swift riders 
over many versts of snow and ice. 

It was a message from Sergius Zouroff to his wife, and her 
women took it to her when she lay asleep — the troubled, weary 
sleep that eomes at morning to those wdiose eyes have not closed 
all night. 

It was but a few words. 

It said only, “I have shot your nightingale in the throat. 
He will sing no more!” 

She read the message. 

For a few moments she knew nothing; a great darkness fell 
upon her, and she saw nothing; it passed away, and the native 
courage and energy of her character came to life after their long 
paralysis. 

She said no word to any living creature. She lay quite still 
upon her bed, her hand crushed upon the 2>aper. She bade her 
women leave her, and they did so, though they were frightened 
at her look and reluctant. 

It was an hour past midnight. 


376 


MOTHS. 


When all was again still, she arose and clothed herself by the 
light of the burning lamp. She put on all her fur-lined gar 
ments. She took some rolls of gold, and the papers that proved 
her identity as the wife of Prince Zouroff, and would enable hei 
to pass the frontier into East Prussia. With these, holding the 
dog by the collar, she took a lamp in her hand and passed through 
the vast, dark, silent corridors that were like the streets of a 
catacomb. There was no one stirring; the household slept the 
heavy sleep of brandy-drinkers. No one heard her step down 
the passages and staircase. She undid noiselessly the bolts and 
bars of a small side door, and went out into the air. It was of a 
piercing coldness. 

It was mid- winter and past midnight. The whole landscape 
was white and frozen. The stars seemed to burn in the steel-hued 
sky. She went across the stone court to where the stables lay. She 
would rouse no one, for she knew that they would to a man obey 
their prince and refuse to permit her departure without his writ- 
ten order. She went to the stalls of the horses. The grooms 
were all asleep. She led out the two that she had driven most 
often since her residence at Szarisla. Her childish training was 
of use to her now. She harnessed them. They knew her well 
and were docile to her touch, and she put them into the light 
velvet-lined sledge in which she had been used to drive herself 
through the fir forests and over the plains. 

Her feebleness and her feverishness had left her. She felt 
strong with the intense strength which comes to women in hours 
of mental agony. Her slender hands had the force of a Hercules 
in them. She had driven so often through all the adjacent lands 
that the plains were as well known to her as the moors of 
Bulmer had been to her in childhood. The sledge and the horses’ 
hoofs made no sound on the frozen snow. She entered the sledge, 
made the dog lie covered at her feet, and, with a word to the swift 
young horses, she drove them out of the gates and into the woods, 
between the aisles of birch and pine. The moonlight was strong ; 
the moon was at the full. The blaze of Northern lights made 
the air clear as day. She knew the road and took it unerringly. 
She drove all night long. No sense of mortal fear reached her. 
She seemed to herself frozen as the earth was. The howl of 
wolves came often on her ears in the ghastly solitude of the un- 
ending lines of dwarfish and storm-rifted trees. At any moment 
some famished pack might scent her coming, on the air, and meet 
her or pursue her, and then of her life there would be no more 
trace than some blood upon the snow, that fresher snow would in 
another hour obliterate. But she never thought of that. All she 
thought of was of the voice which, for her sake, was mute for- 
ever. 

When in the faint red of the sullen winter’s dawn she arrived 
at the first posting-village with her horses drooping and exhaust- 
ed, the postmaster was afraid to give her other horses to pass on; 
she could show him no order from Prince Zouroff; but she had 
gold with her, and at length induced him to bring out fresh 
animals, leaving her own with him to be sent back on the mor- 
row to Szarisla. The postmaster was terrified at what he had 


MOTHS. 


37 ? 


done, and shuddered at what might be his chastisement; but the 
gold had dazzled him. He gazed after her as the sledge flew 
over the white ground against the crimson glow of the daybreak, 
and prayed for her to St. Nicholas. 

Driving on and on, never pausing save to change her horses, 
never stopping either to eat or rest, taking a draught of tea and 
an atom of bread here and there at a post-house, she at length 
reached the frontiers of East Prussia. 

Correze lay on his bed in his house at Paris Crowds, from 
princes and senators and marshals to workmen and beggars and 
street Arabs, came and asked for him, and the people stood in 
the street without, sorrowful and anxious. For the first news 
they had heard was that he would die; then they were told that 
the hemorrhage had ceased, that it was possible he might live, 
but that he would never sing again. 

Paris heard, and wept for its darling; wept yet more for its 
own lost music. 

The days and the weeks went on, and the first emotion and ex- 
citement waned with time. Then the Crown-Prince of Ger- 
many came into the city; there were feasts, reviews, illumina- 
tions. Paris, as she forgot her own wrongs, forgot her mute 
singer, lying in his darkened room; and the bouquets in his hall 
were faded and dead. 

No one left fresh ones. 

Only some score of poor people, among them a blind man and 
a little ugly girl, hung always, trembling and sobbing, about his 
doors, afraid lest their angel should unfold his wings and leave 
them for the skies. 

Correze lay in his darkness, dumb. 

He had been shot in the throat; he himself had fired in the air. 

When he had fallen, with the blood filling his mouth, he had 
found voice to say to his adversary, “ Your wife is faultless l” 

Prince Zouroff had looked down on him with a cold and fierce 
contentment. 

“ I have done you the honor to meet you, but I am not your 
dupe,” he had said, as he turned away; and yet in his soul he 
knew — knew as well as that the heavens were above him — that 
this man, whom he believed to be dying, spoke the truth. 

They had met in the garden of the house of Gorreze. They had 
taken only their seconds with them. It had all been amoved 
and over by sunrise. Sergius Zouroff had hastened out of the 
city, and over the frontier, to make his peace with his sovereign 
in his own country. Correze had been carried into his own 
house and laid in his own bed-chamber. Their friends, ac- 
cording to the instructions given them previously, had sent 
to the newspapers of the hour a story of an accident that 
had occurred in playing with a pistol; although it had been soon 
suspected that this was but a cover to a hostile account, and 
rumors of the truth had soon run tlirough Paris, the facts had 
not been known. 

He lay in the gloom and silence of his chamber; Sisters of 
Charity were watching him: it was twilight there, though out- 
side in Paris the sun was shining on multitudes of people and 


373 


MOTHS. 


divisions of troops as the city flocked to a review in the Champ 
de Mars. 

He could not speak; they would save his life, perhaps, but he 
knew that they could never save his voice. 

As a singer he was dead. 

All the joys of his art and all its powers were perished for- 
evermore; all the triumph and the ecstasy of song were finished 
as a tale that is told; all the fame of his life and its splendor were 
snapped asunder in their prime and perfection, as a flower is brok- 
en off in full blossom. 

“And I did her no good!” he thought: he had lost all and he 
had done nothing! 

He was half delirious; his sight languidly recognized the 
familiar room about him, and watched the stray lines of sun- 
shine glimmer through the shutters; but his mind was absorbed 
and full of dull feverish dreams; he thought now of St. Peters- 
burg, with the rain of hothouse flowers on the ice in hisl nights 
of triumph, now of the Norman sunshine with the common roses 
blooming against the fence of furze, now of the bleak snow-plains 
of Szarisla. All was confused to him and showed like 
figures in a mist. Sometimes he thought that he was already 
dead, already in his tomb, and that about him the crowds of 
Paris were singing his own Noel. Sometimes he thought 
that he was walking with Dante and with Virgil, and 
that devils tried to hold him down as he strove to cry aloud to 
Christ, “ Lord, she is innocent!” 

All the while he was mute; he could scarcely breathe, he coult. 
not speak. 

Uusconscious though they thought him, he heard them say 
around his bed, “ he may speak again, perhaps, but he will never 
be able to sing a note.” 

They thought him deaf as well as dumb. But he heard and 
understood. 

In his fever and his suffering he said always in his heart, “ If 
only she will think that I did well!” 

Then he would grow delirious again and forget, and fancy that 
he was called to sing to the people dnd that his mouth was closed 
with steel. 

The wintry sunshine was brilliant and clear, it was in]the|after- 
noon; through the dusk of his room there came the distant sounds 
of trumpets, and the boom of the cannon of the Invahdes. All 
else was still. 

All Paris was interested with the pleasure of a spectacle; the 
streets were deserted, the houses were emptied, all the city was 
in the Champ de Mars, and on the c“old clear air bursts of distant 
sounds from clashing cymbals and robing drums came into the 
chamber of Correze whom Paris had forgotten. 

At the Gare de l’Est with other travelers at that moment there 
descended from a sleeping-carriage a woman clothed in furs, and 
with a dog in a leash beside her. 

She walked quickly and with a haughty movement across the 
crowded waiting-room; she was alone except for her dog. Her 
fa~e was very white, her eyes seemed to burn as the stars did in 


MOTHS 378 

the Polish frost. She was praying with all the might of prayer 
in her soul. 

She might be too late to see h-im living — too late to tell him 
that she loved him — she, for whose sake and in whose sake and 
in whose defense he had found death, or worse than death! 

All the courage, all the fearlessness, all the generosity of her 
soul had leaped up into life and movement; she had ceased to 
remember herself or the world; she only prayed to heaven, 
“Grant him his life, his beautiful life, that is like sunlight 
upon earth!” 

She had come across the middle of Europe in the winter 
weather, over the snow-plains and the frozen rivers, unaided, un- 
accompanied, making no pause, taking no rest either by night or 
by day, as she had come through Poland. 

She descended into the noise and dirt of the street — she who 
had never been a yard on foot unattended in a city. The move- 
ment around her seemed to her ghastly and horrible. Could he 
lie dying, and the city he loved not be still and stricken a 
moment? 

She mingled with the crowds and was soon lost in them, she 
who had always gone through Paris with pomp and splendor, 
she at whose loveliness the mob had always turned to look, she 
who had been the Princess Zouroff. 

The day was drawing to its close; the troops were returning, 
the multitudes were shouting. In his darkened room Correze, 
disturbed and distressed by the sounds, moved wearily and sighed. 

The door of his chamber opened, and Vere entered. 

She threw her furs and coverings off her as she moved, and 
came to the listers of Charity. The lassitude, the weakness, the 
sickness which had weighed on her, and suffocated her youth in 
her, were gone; there was a great anguish in her eyes, but she 
moved with her old free, proud grace, she bore herself with the 
courage of one whose resolve is taken and whose peace is made. 

“ I am the woman for whom he fought,” she said to the nuns. 
“ My place is with you.” 

Then she went to the side of his bed and kneeled there. 

“ It is I,” she said, in a low voice. 

From the misty darkness of pain and delirium his senses 
struggled into life; his eyes unclosed and rested on her face, and 
had such glory in them as shone in the eyes of martyrs who saw 
the saints descend to them. 

He could not speak, he only gazed at her. 

She bent her proud head lower and lower and touched his 
hand with hers. 

“ You have lost all for me. If it comfort you — I am here! 


CHAPTER XXXII. 

In the beait of the Alps of the Valais there lies a little lake, 
nameless to the world, but beautiful: green meadows and woods 
of pine and beech encircle it, and above it rise the snow-moun- 
fcains, the glory nearest heaven that earth knows. 

A road winds down between the hills to Sion, but it is seldom 


380 


MOTHS . 


traversed; the air is pure and clear as crystal, strong as wine; 
brooks and torrents tumble through a wilderness of ferns, the 
cattle-maiden sings on the high grass-slopes, the fresh-water fisher- 
man answers the song from his boat on the lake, deep down be- 
low and darkly green as emeralds are. 

The singer who is mute to the world forever listens to the song 
without pain, for he is happy. 

His home is here, above the shadowy water, facing the grand 
amphitheater of ice and snow, that at daybreak and at sunset 
flash like the rose, glow like the fires of a high altar. It is an 
old house built to resist all storms, yet open for the sun and sum- 
mer; simple, yet noble, with treasures of art and graces of color, 
and the gifts of kings and emperors and cities, given in those 
years that are gone forever to Correze. The waters wash its 
walls, the pine woods shelter it from the winds, its terraces face 
the Alps. 

Here, when the world is remembered, it seems but a confused 
and foolish dream, a fretting fever, a madness of disordered 
minds and carking discontent. What is the world beside Nat- 
ure and a love that scarcely even fears death since it believes it- 
self to be immortal? 

; He leans over the stone balustrade of his terrace and watches 
the rose-leaves, shaken off by the wind, drop down into the green 
water far below and float there like pink shells. On a marble 
table by him there lie some pages of written music, the score of 
an opera, with which he hopes to achieve a second fame in the 
kingdom of music which knows him no more. A great genius 
can never altogether rest without creation, and he is yet young 
enough to win the ivy crown twice over in his life. 

In the sunset light a woman, with a dog beside her, comes out 
on to the terrace. She is clothed in white; her face has regained 
its early loveliness, her eyes have a serious sweet luminance; on 
her life there will be always the sadness of a noble nature that 
has borne the burden of others’ sins, of a grand temper that has 
known the bitterness of calumny and has given back an unjust 
scorn with a scorn just and severe; those shadows all the tender- 
ness, the reverence, the religious homage of a man’s surpassing 
dove can never wholly banish from her. 

jl As with him, amidst his happiness, there will sometimes arise 
a wistful longing, not for the homage of the world, not for his 
old hours of triumph, not for the sight of multitudes waiting on 
the opening of his lips, but for that magical power forever per- 
ished, that empire forever lost over all the melody of earth, that 
joy and strength of utterance which are now forever as dead in 
him as the song is dead in the throat of the shot bird, so upon 
her, for no fault of her own, the weight of a guilt not her own 
lies heavily, and the ineffaceable past is like a ghost that tracks 
her steps; from her memory the pollution of her marriage never 
can pass away, and to her purity her life seems forever defiled by 
those dead years, which are like millstones hung about her neck. 

She was innocent always, and yet . When the moths have 

gnawed the ermine, no power in Heaven or earth can make it 
ever again altogether what once it was. 


MOTHS . 


381 


‘You never regret?” Vere says to him, as they stand together 
and see the evening colors of glory shine on the snow-summits. 

“I? Regret that I lost the gas-glare to live in Heaven’s 
light! Can you ask such a thing?” 

“Yet you lost so much, and ” 

“I have forgotten what I lost. Nay, I lost nothing. I passed 
away off the world’s ear while I was yet great; how well that 
is!— to be spared all the discontent of decadence, all the pain 
of diminished triumphs, all the restless sting of new rivalries, 
all the feebleness of a fame that has outlived itself; how well 
that is!” 

She smiles — that grave and tender smile which is rather 
from the eyes than on the mouth. 

“You say that because you are always generous. Yet when 
I think of all I cost you, I wonder that you love me so well.” 

“You wonder! That is because you cannot see yourself; 
humility blinds you, as vanity blinds other women.” 

“They called me too proud ” 

“Because you were not as they were. What could they un- 
derstand of such a soul as yours?” 

“You understand me, and God sees me; that is enough.” 

He takes her hands in his, and his kiss on them has as 
reverent and knightly a grace as that with which he had bent 
to her feet in the day of Szarisla. 

What is the world to them? what is the bray and the tinsel 
of a mountebank’s show to those who watch the stars and 
dwell in the gracious silence of the everlasting hills? 
******** 
L’ENVOI. 

In - the bright evening light of the springtime at the same 
hour the crowds go down the Boulevards of Paris. The black 
horses of Prince Zouroff go with them; he is sitting behind 
them alone. His face is gloomy; his eyes are sullen. On the 
morrow he marries his old friend Jeanne, Duchesse de Sonnaz. 

Russia, which permits no wife to plead against her husband', 
set him free and annulled his marriage on the testimony of 
servants, who, willing to please, and indifferent to a lie the 
more or a lie the less, bore the false witness that they thought 
would be agreeable to their lord. 

Too late he repents; too late he regrets; too late he thinks, 
as, alas! we all think, “Could I have my life back, I would do 
otherwise!” 

In her own carriage, down the Avenue du Bois, drives the 
Duchesse de Sonnaz, with her children in front of her; her 
face is sparkling, her eyes are full of malice and entertain- 
ment; the Faubourg finds her approaching marriage with her 
lost Paul’s old friend one natural and fitting. With a satis- 
fied soul she says to herself, as the setting sun gilds Paris — 

“Avec un pen d’esprit on arrive a tout.” 

For marriage she does not care, but she loves a triumph, she 
enjoys a vengeance: she has both. 

“Je feral danser mon our a” she reflects, as the eyes of her 
mind glance over her future. 

[The Princess Nelaguine drives also in her turn out of the 


MOTHS 


ass 

a venue and down the Champs Elysees; with her is her old com- 
rade, Count Schondorff, who says to her — 

“And you alone know your brothers divorced wife! Oh, 
surely, Nadine ” 

“I know the wife of Correze; I know a very noble woman who 
was the victim of my own brother and of Jeanne,” answers the 
little Russian lady, with asperity and resolve. “My dear Fritz, 
she had no sin against my brother, no fault in her anywhere; I 
have told the Emperor the same thing; and I am not a coward, 
though I shall salute Jeanne on both cheeks to-morrow, because 
life is a long hypocrisy. Yes, I know Vera. I shall always love 
her, and honor her too. So does the Duchess of Mull. She was 
the martyr of a false civilization, of a society as corrupt as that 
of the Borgias, and far more dishonest. She had chastity, and 
she had also courage. We, who are all poltroons, and most of us 
adulteresses, when we find a womanlike that, gibbet her, pour 
encourager les autres.” 

At the same hour Lady Dolly, too, rolls home from Hyde Park, 
and ascends to her little fan-lined boudoir, and cries a little 
prettily with her old friend Adine, because she has just learned 
that Jura, poor dear Jura, has been killed in the gun-room at 
Camelot by the explosion of a rifle he had taken down as un- 
loaded. 

“Everything is so dreadful!” she says, with a little sob and 
shiver. “ Only to think that I cannot know my own daughter! 
And then to have to wear one’s hair flat, and the bonnets are not 
becoming, say what they like, and the season is so stupid; and 
now poor dear Jack has killed himself, really killed himself — be- 
cause nobody believes about that rifle being an accident, he has 
been so morose and so strange for years — and his mother comes 
and reproaches me, when it is all centuries ago, centuries! and I 
am sure I never did him anything but good!” 

Other ladies come in, all great ladies, and some men, all young 
men, and they have tea out of little yellow cups, and sip iced 
syrups, and sit and talk of the death at Camelot, as they chatter 
between the four walls, with the celebrated fans hung all over 
them, amidst them the fan of Maria Theresa once sent to Felicite. 

“ She has so much to bear, and she is such a dear little woman!” 
say all the friends of Lady Dolly. “ And it is very dreadful for 
her not to be able to know her own daughter. She always be- 
haves beautifully about it, she is so kind, so sweet. But how can 
she know her, you know? divorced and living out of the world 
with Correze!” 

So the moths ea* the ermine; and the world kisses the leper on 
both cheeks. 

{JBE END.? 


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